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SONS OF THE EMERALD ISLE, 



LIVES OF ONE THOUSAND 



REMARKABLE IRISHMEN 



INCLUDING 



MEMOIRS OF NOTED CHARACTERS 



IRISH PARENTAGE OR DESCENT. 



^J- 



BY WILLIAM l) MACKENZIE 



Hail to that land, whatever land it be, 
Which, struggling hard, is panting to be free! 

Goldsmith. 



PUBLISHED BY BURGESS, STRINGER AND COMPANY, 

222 BROADWAY, CORNER OF ANN STREET. 

1844. 



•B 



iiiii! 1 




2Tf)is Volume 

IS INSCRIBED TO THE MEMORY OF 

COLONEL WILLIAM DUANE, 

OF PHILADELPHIA, 

a<> a toAen ofi zeaazu for me fezonctfe/eo wnccn, 
yrtu/ea Am cudtntezeatea, man/?/ career — -/or me &m= 
€€21/?/, avi/tt'?/, ana /eaz/(/ vnaefeenaence zvimi, wnccd 
ne 41/YiAozfea me cau^e ojf ■nuniantl?/, Szttm, ana 
t'cwtwe, often in oituationo 0/ azeat {ztaf, aanaer, 
ana /ittva&on, zonae ducceJ-jtvefu a teniae nt of iS&H/z^ 
feuzo/ic, ana iS&mezica, auuna me ca^l tuctu yeaza 
0* nut eventful u/c. 

W. L. MACKENZIE. 



is&a 



Entered, according to Act of Congress, by W. L. Mackenzie, in the Clerk's Office of the Southern 

District of New-York. 



tJS. 



INTRODUCTION. 

Tin. volume contains brief memoirs or notices of over nine hundred na- 
tives of kcland, and one hundred sons and more remote descendants of I 
men A compendious index and table of contents will render it useful for 
referVnet, as a biographical dictionary, although the names are not arranged 

"iSSltovdty in an attempt to afford a brief but accurate record of 
one thou and remarkable individuals-statesmen, divines, jurists poets, phi- 
fosoDhers historians, warriors, patriots, eminent scholars and noted cha.ac- 
rrs P boh good and ted, of various religions and shades of politics, all of Ire- 
and dr Irfsh extraction-to show by a multitude of facts bow mutually ad- 
a i aiou America and Ireland have been and may be to each other-bow 
deenlv indebted the Union is to Irish settlers, Irish literature, and Irish valor 
and hoi foolish or wicked those persons are who seek to proscribe or quarrel 
with Z natural ally of our republic, a nation determined to gam that inde- 
pendence winch its' gallant sons powerfully aided America to attain and pre- 

S( Twould have been desirable to give at greater length the lives of those 
who had attained to distinction in the various departments of human pursuit 
couhl thafhave been accomplished without such an increase in the size and 
rost of the work as would materially lessen its circulation. 

These pa^e afford abundant proofs, that Irishmen and their sons were 
? econd1o P none, in faithfulness to popular inst tutions an L * ^^™ 
and 1812 to uphold the independence of the Union— that they are trie lit ciai 
friends ana paTrons of science and the useful arts, everywhere -J at they 
know the value of a government founded on mild and equal lans, and despise 
those vho would barter liberty for worldly wealth or ar.stocra ic connexion- 
ind that on both sides of the Atlantic, and in every quarter of the globe, the 
sons of the Emerald Isle, have been honorably distinguished for sagacity and 
courage learning, skill, and manly enterprise. 

The vices and crimes which afflict society are partly caused by ignorance, 
bu more by a lack of integrity in many persons by no -eans deficient in in- 
tehVence Our most dangerous characters know too much ; andaiepealot 
he na uralizat.on laws would but divide us into citizens and aliens, the fa- 
vored and the proscribed, the slaves and their masters, having separate feel- 
E and interests. The ignorant may be instructed, prejudices removed and 
define Taws amended, but how shall we get rid of the incubus brought on 
bv a legion of insincere politicians ? „ ' .\. c 

W lm were the first settlers in America? Aliens to a man-foreigners- 
stram'L-manv of them unleamed-these were the pioneers who acquired 
a chizenship by" cultivating the soil, by retrieving it from barrenness-not by 
tine bom on it. The "Native American Associations" of our day are the 
descen s of those alien strangers, and if we compare their conduct to the 
emtrants who now reach our shores with that of the savages who were the 
'Native American Associations" of a former age it will be seen that the chil- 
dren of thfforeigner, who was met on the beach by the red man of the forest, 
and ^welcomed to America as a part of the great family oi man, are now or- 
gaized, anxious, earnest, unwearied in their efforts to levy a tax from even 
fheWt impoverished of the kindred of their sires, for the privilege of land- 
V^Z our ThJres-to denounce the hardy settlers from Europe as if they 
were an inferior, degraded race-to obtain legislative provisions for treating 
Tern as their serfs aid bondmen, to be taxed at their will, governed la their 
discretion, never admitted as brethren to the exercise of common rights, but 



IT INTRODUCTION. 

always subject to an order to go into immediate banishment, under a govern- 
ment of proscription^ persecution, and prejudice. 

It is to make the youth of America ashamed of such associations and such 
principles, that this volume is published— it is to remind them that the earth 
is man's heritage, that those who are born under a bad government have a 
right to leave it and seek a good one, and that as they bear the image of God, 
it is wicked even to attempt "to turn them away from a portion of that earth 
which was given by its Maker to all mankind, with no natural marks to des- 
ignate the limits beyond which they may not freely pass." 

England's rulers brought about a pretended union with Scotland in 1707, 
and with Ireland in 1800, not on terms of equality, but to subject these 
countries more completely to her power. Escaping from her persecution, 
Irishmen and Scotchmen prefer a home and freedom here. Who shall stop 
their ingress ? Men born and educated in monarchies or under the colonial 
yoke achieved the independence of this great republic — eight of the signers 
of the declaration of independence were Irish or of that descent, and among 
the warriors who fought that that declaration might be maintained, this vol- 
ume will show that Hibemia's beroes, who nobly responded to the earnest 
invitation of a patriot Congress to come hither and help us, in the hour of 
danger and distress, were neither last nor least. Yet it is a truth that no peo- 
ple, even in free, enlightened, republican America, have borne more abuse 
and obloquy where they deserved commendation and gratitude, than the coun- 
trymen of Burke, Grattan, Curran, Goldsmith, Steele, Sheridan, and Moore, 
illustrious names, who breathed the national genius of the Emerald Isle, dis- 
playing "the sentiment, the deep thought and deeper feeling, the fine ima- 
gination and exquisite fancy which belong to the national character." 

I am persuaded that the true method by which America may increase the 
happiness of the whole family of man, is to preserve a sincere, enlightened, 
upright course of conduct, because this would prove to the satisfaction of the 
wise and good in every land, that elective institutions are the best means 
whereby a spirit of christian forbearance and brotherly kindness may be dif- 
fused throughout the earth. To conquer worlds, the citizens of the United 
States have but to take the United Irishmen's oath (for administering which 
William Orr died on the scaffold), and keep it. 

This country has been for centuries the refuge of the oppressed. The pil- 
grim fathers were self-banished from the pleasant places of their youth, the 
loved land of their sires — they sought a home and freedom here two hundred 
years ago— the persecuted Catholic— the proscribed heretic— the outlawed 
patriot — the bold wanderer, braved the dangers of the ocean and the climate 
— they sought this soil, all animated by one universal yearning for that heav- 
en-born liberty, that unbounded freedom of thought and opinion, without 
which our Union would not be worth preserving. 

The humble author of these memoirs ventures to introduce himself to the 
acquaintance of the courteous reader. He is of Celtic origin. His parents 
were born in the Scottish highlands — the Irish or Gaelic was their native 
tongue. Both his grandfathers fought at Culloden, side by side with the gal- 
lant Mercer, against the house of Brunswick and a Union which had degrad- 
ed their ancient nation, by reducing it to the condition of an English province, 
and its clergy to a dependance on aristocratic patrons. In Canada, he en- 
deavored for many years to prove himself a "friend and advocate of liberty," 
in fulfilment of his pledge to the good Lafayette. For so doing, and aiding 
in efforts in 1837-'38 to carry into effect the well-known wishes of the con- 
gresses of 1775 and 1812, relative to Canadian independence, he was out- 
lawed by monarchy, which proscribes him to this very hour, while democracy, 
in its turn, further impoverished him by a long and severe imprisonment. In 
the time of trouble and difficulty Irish sympathy was pleasing and acceptable, 
nor was it withheld — this volume, therefore, is offered to the public, as a to- 
ken of gratitude and respect for Irish friends, and of long-cherished attach- 
ment to free institutions. 

New York, February 2d, 1844. 



THE 



LIVES OF REMARKABLE IRISHMEN, &c. 



♦ROBERT FULTON. 



What has Ireland to do with him? Is the magician of the nineteenth 
century — he who annihilated, and taught his pupils of every clime to annihi- 
late, as it were, both time and space — he whose genius first conjured up that 
vast Leviathan of the deep, which the dwellers on the banks of the Indus, 
the Ganges, and the Amazon, behold with terror and amazement — a power 
which has already revolutionized the science of war, diminished the distance 
between Europe and America one half, for all purposes of travel, and be- 
stowed a speed and certainty on sailing which defy the controlling influen- 
ces even of winds and waves — is he, the master spirit of the age, also of 
Irish parentage ? It is even so. 

Mark yonder gallant ship, just issuing from the noble harbor of the chief 
city of America, prepared by the aid of steam to breast the billows, and ac- 
complish in two weeks, or less, a voyage across the wide Atlantic, heretofore 
often the work of months ! Who planned, built, and navigated the first of 
her kind ? Robert Fulton, the son of an Irish father and an Irish mother. 
He it was among the sons of men who first established and perfected steam- 
navigation on the seas, lakes, and rivers of this great globe, who conferred 
on America benefits of incalculable value. 

Mr. Fulton was born at Little Britain, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, in 
1765. His father and mother, like the father and mother of Andrew Jack- 
son, were humble emigrants from old Ireland, with little education and 
less Avealth — persons of that class whom short-sighted politicians, of an 
age gone by, would have mulcted in ten dollars each, by way of discour- 
aging the humble and industrious from seeking that home and freedom here 
which an older world denies. Young Robert received a common education 
at an English school — discovered a taste for drawing and mechanics — went to 
Philadelphia and painted portraits and landscapes, as a means of living — 
sailed for London in 1786— resided for several years there, in the house of 
Benjamin West, the great American painter — took out, in 1794, several pat- 
ents, and published a work on canal navigation — removed in 1796 to Paris, 
and there resided for seven years in the house of Joel Barlow, the American 
Minister, studied the principal European languages, and the higher branches 
of science, projected the first Panorama exhibited at Paris — and, being en- 
couraged by Chancellor Livingston, who had arrived in France as the repre- 
sentative of the United States, began to make experiments with small 
steamboats on the river Seine. A larger one was built, which broke asunder 
— a second, completed in 1803, was successful, and proved the truth of his 
theory, to his great joy. 

The English government invited Mr. Fulton to London in 1804, but his ex- 

* Persons not born in Ireland, but of Irish parentage, are distinguished by one star before their 
names— if of more remote Irish descent, by two stars. 



2 ROBERT FULTON— SIR RICHARD STEELE. 

periments with reference to machinery of some sort then required, were not 
Cully successful. In IS06 he returned to the United States — arrived at New 
York — and with funds supplied by Mr. Livingston (a descendant of a coun- 
tryman of Watt, the great improver of steam-power), built and navigated on 
the waters of the Hudson river, a steamboat of considerable size — then anoth- 
er, and another — and finally a frigate, which bore his name. His fame was 
high and his fortune rapidly progressing, when the patent which Mr. Living- 
ston and himself had taken out was contested, and in a great degree rendered 
inoperative — the lawyers harassed and worried him, as they did the great 
Watt, by their quibbles and villanous forms and procedure, invented to im- 
pede right, and tolerated only because of the laziness of one part of the peo- 
ple and the ignorance of another, in England and America — and it is said he 
caught a slight cold. The lawyers fretting him, and the cold, hastened his 
death, which took place at New York, on the 24th of February [the 23d, ac- 
cording to the N. Y. Evening Post], 1815, in the 44th year of his age. The 
national demonstrations of unaffected sorrow for the loss of the Washington 
in Mechanics— he who had drawn the most distant parts of the Union nearer 
to each other — who had applied a power by means of which the Mississip- 
pi and Missouri, the St. Lawrence and the Amazon, the Rhine and the Hud- 
son, could be navigated with ease and certainty — were universal throughout 
the Union. He sleeps the sleep of death, but his monument will endure for 
ever — the steamships crossing the Atlantic or Pacific, or stemming the Ohio, 
the Danube, the Thames, the Scheldt, or the Shannon, will be for ever asso- 
ciated in the mind of man with the name of him who first set them in motion 
— the son of an humble Hibernian — \£~r* our own FULTON.^O 

Mr. Fulton was tall, well formed, but slender ; and gentlemen who were 
among his most intimate friends in the Union, speak of his memory with en- 
thusiasm. He was amiable, social, and very liberal. President Jefferson, in 
1807, wished to connect Mr. Fulton with the military defence of the country, 
and (says Mr. Duane's Aurora) offered him the command of the regiment 
of light artillery, or a Colonelcy of Engineers, but he declined both situations. 

At the time of Mr. Fulton's death, says the Evening Post, of February, 
1815, "he was engaged, in conjunction with the committee on coast and har- 
bor defence, in constructing a vessel-of-war, to be propelled by steam. This 
grand engine was within a few weeks of completion, when the news of 
peace reached the country, and its ingenious and incomparable inventor was 
called to another world." Oadwallader D. Colden was his biographer. On 
Thursday, January 7, 1808, Dr. Beach married Mr. Fulton to Miss Harriet 
Livingston, daughter of Walter Livingston of the Upper Manor. 



SIR RICHARD STEELE. 

Sir Richard Steele, son to a counsellor at law, the private secretary to the 
Duke of Ormond, was born in Dublin, Ireland, 1076, and died in London, 1st 
Sept., (another account says in Wales,) 1729, aged 53 years. He Avas the fa- 
ther of the Periodical Essay, and was the originator, conductor, and the work- 
ing and responsible man for the Spectator, the Tatler, the Guardian, and 
the Englishman, with some of which he commenced in 1709. He began the 
Tatler at 40 years of age — enlisted as a private soldier when a youth, and got 
disinherited by a rich relative for so doing — fought a duel Avhen a military of- 
ficer, and ran his opponent through the body with his sword — wrote the 
" Christian Hero" — wrote several plays— was a player at Drury Lane, and 
well paid— became a warm partisan writer while a member of the British 
Parliament— offended the Tories by his satirical papers in " the Englishman" 
and "the. Crisis" — they declared them to be seditious libels, and Sir Puchard, 
after an able defence of himself in a three hours' speech, was expelled from 
the House of Commons, by a vote of 245 against 152. He Avas a great and 
most sincere reformer of the vices and follies of the age, and his very faults 



MAJOR GENERAL MONTGOMERY. 3 

taught him how to probe the faults of others, and adapt instruction to their ne- 
cessities. His works have been often published and arc much read in America. 
Addison was his warm friend, and aiiied him, essentially by writing invaluable 
i ssaj s in the Spectator Swift, Parnell, Berkeley, Young, Pope, and (lay, were 
: Uo Ins coa'dju tors', or assisted him mure or less. 

The Spectator is said to be " by Addison," but two fifths of the papers in 
the first seven volumes were by Steele. He paid Berkeley a guinea and a 
dinner for each paper he wrote for the Tatler — the sale was immense. His 
(Steele's) jvife brought him a handsome fortune, public favor shone upon 
him, his success in life was brilliant, but it was not in his nature to get rich. 
Like Goldsmith he had a kind, faithful, and affectionate disposition: warm, 
generous feelings. How tender his remembrance of the happy or affecting 
scenes of his childhood ! How lively his sense of the beauty of a sound, hon- 
est heart ! 

Among Sir Richard's works are, Love-a-la-Mode, The Tender Husband, 
The Lying Lovers, and The Conscious Lovers, plays — An Account of the Ro- 
man Catholic Religion throughout the World (1715) — A Letter to the King 
from the Earl of Mar — The Spinster — A Letter to Lord Oxford on the Peerage 
Bill — The Crisis of Property — The Nation a Family, or the South Sea Scheme 
— The Theatre, a periodical, kc. 



MAJOR GENERAL MONTGOMERY. 

Richard Montgomery was born in the north of Ireland, in the year 1737 
— commanded a British regiment under General Wolfe at Quebec in 1759, and 
earned a high reputation for courage, skill, and military talent— married a 
daughter of Judge Livingston of New York state — condemned British oppres- 
sion as exercised toward the colonists — adopted their cause as his own, and 
America as his country — and, in 1775, became commander-in-chief of the con- 
tinental forces in Canada. 

Irishmen ! Although there are great faults in the administration of govern- 
ment in the United States, forget not, I pray you, that the democratic system 
under which we live, is most favorable to liberty ; and that the spread of 
knowledge, the encouragement of temperance, the cultivation of those benev- 
olent feelings for which you are proverbially distinguished, Avith an unceasing 
vigilance in the exercise of jour elective rights, will do much to increase the 
happiness of America, much toward the independence of Ireland. For vou, 
for freedom, and for America, RICHARD MONTGOMERY, your illustrious 
countryman, was bravely contending 68 years ago, amid the frosts and storms 
of Canada, when he was, on the night of the 31st of December, 1775, slain be- 
fore the walls of Quebec, by a discharge of grape-shot, which killed his aids 
at same time, and, by preventing the capture, essentially changed the destiny 
of Canada. The bodies of the general and his aids, Macpherson and Cheese- 
man, were found on the morning of Jan. 1, 1776. On the 16th of June, ISIS, 
the general's remains were removed from Quebec to St. Paul's churchyard, 
New York, and interred near a monument erected by Congress to his mem- 
ory. His age-stricken widow lived to see the remains of her hero thus hon- 
ored, 43 years nearly after his friend, the governor of Canada, had buried his 
body within the walls of Quebec. His career was truly brilliant. He reduced 
Fort Chambly, Canada, captured St. John's and Montreal, and would have 
stormed Quebec, had not the only gun fired from the enemy's battery checked 
his career, at 38 years of age. 

To that numerous class who would proscribe the Irish farmer or mechanic, 
or admit him only on a principle at war with the Christian rule of equal rights 
which holds out a warm hope to ihe oppressed of every land, kindred, and 
tongue, in the great Declaration of American Independence, I would say — 
" When all might have been lost by treachery, who was it that sold his coun- 
try — who was the traitor? Benedict Arnold, a native American. Where then 
were the Irish ? Where the Pennsylvania Line ? Where the sons and grand- 



4 ROBERT EMMET. 

sons of Irishmen ? Turn to the biography of Generals Sullivan, Clinton, Stark, 
Irvine, Wayne, and Montgomery, of Colonels Fitzgerald, Moylan, Proctor, 
Stewart, and Campbell, of Commodore Barry, of Majors Croghan, Macdonough, 
and James : as also of Thornton, Read, Smith, Carroll, Rutledge, McKean, 
Lynch, and Taylor, whose signatures, with that of Charles Thomson, to the 
declaration of independence of the 4th of July, 1776, attest our nation's entrance 
into this breathing world, a glorious republic, the asylum of the oppressed on 
earth, and as such a type of heaven. Turn also to the names of Vice Pres- 
ident Clinton, Andrew Jackson, President McKinly, Dr. Ptamsay, Governors 
Rutledge, Sullivan, and Bryan, John Smilie, and of a hundred other distin- 
guished characters on this side of the water — mark the efforts of Edmund 
Burke, Colonel Barrc, Henry Flood, Henry Grattan, and other liberal and en- 
lightened Irishmen in the British and Irish legislatures — and hasten to dis- 
solve your associations, and blush that any of the children of the revolution 
should ever have proved ingrates to the memory of the friends and benefac- 
tors of their country in the hour of its utmost need. "■ Your Parliament had 
done us no wrong," said the American Congress, in their unanimous address 
in 177-5 to the people of Ireland. " You had ever been friendly to the rights 
of mankind — and we acknowledge with pleasure and with gratitude, that your 
nation has produced Patriots who have nobly distinguished themselves in the 
cause of humanity and America." 



ROBERT EMMET. 

On the 19th of September, 1803, this youth of talent, character, education, 
and honorable connexions, was tried in Dublin, before Lord Norbury, and Barons 
George and Daly, for heading the unfortunate rising in Dublin on the night 
of the 23d of July, that year. It appeared that Mr. Emmet and his friends 
were as jealous of French interference as they were of English domination. 
Emmet was defended by Burrowes, and MacNally— Leonard MacNally, the 
government pensioner, was his law-agent ! John Fleming, an ostler from 
Kildare, was chief evidence against Emmet, who was the soul of the scheme. 
Like Frost, in Wales, and others I might feelingly mention, he found too late 
that there was but little reliance to be placed on an undisciplined multitude, 
hastily collected in a band, and accustomed to be ruled by terror, cruelty, and 
foreign bayonets. Emmet was arrested a month after the revolt, by Major 
Sirr, and exhibited much spirit, gallantry, humanity, and love of country. 
He was found guilty, and hanged on the 20th of September, 1803, beheaded, 
and his body mutilated. Dowdal, Quigley, Allen, and Stafford, seem to 
have been his principal aids. 

In his "Recollections of Curran," Counsellor Phillips truly remarks, "that 
so unprepared was the government for a revolt, that there was not a single 
ball with which to supply the artillery — and that had the followers of Emmet 
had common sense or common conduct, the castle of Dublin must have fallen 
into their possession." Mr. Emmet was then but 23 years old, had graduated 
at Dublin University, and "was gifted with abilities and virtues which ren- 
dered him an object of universal esteem. Every one loved — every one re- 
spected him. The poets of antiquity were his companions — its patriots his 
models — its republics his admiration." His trial may be said to have been 
secret — the public were excluded — the military filled every corner, every av- 
enue ; there was not one person in colored clothes allowed to enter the court- 
house ! 

The inspired author of Lalla Rookh, the friend and cotemporary of Emmet 
at college, thus beautifully alludes to him in his Irish Melodies : — 

O breathe not his name ! let it sleep in the shade 
Where, cold and unhonored, his relics are laid ! 
Sad, silent, and dark, be the tears that we shed, 
As the night-dew that falls on the grass o'er his head. 



JUDGE PERRIN — REV. ADAM CLARKE, LL. D. 

But the night-dew that falls, though in silence it weep?, 
Shall brighten with verdure the grave where he sleeps; 
And the (ear that we shed, though in secret it rolls, 
Shall long keep his memory green in our souls. 



JUDGE PERRIN. 

Lodis Perrin, one of the Justices of the King's Bench, Ireland, was a true and 
tried friend of Robert Emmet ; and when the latter was sentenced by the titled 
buffoon, Lord Norbury, Perrin, then a youthful law-student, stepped from 
among the spectators and affectionately embraced the martyr. " Honest Louis 
Perrin" is almost an Irish proverb, and for 40 years has he — though a lawyer 
— deserved the name he bears. He was the son of poor parents, received 
his education at Armagh, entered Dublin college as a pensioner in 1790, and 
was always found under Mr. Emmet's colors, standing up for freedom, intel- 
ligence, and the liberties of old Ireland. We, of Canada, like the Irish iu 
179S and 1803, found to our cost, that " the most effectual mode to sharpen 
the sword of the oppressor is the attempt to destroy it, and not to succeed" — 
and when Emmet failed in a good cause he, too, sharpened that sword and 
fell by it. Perrin did all he could for his country in a peaceful way — his sig- 
nature was attached to every petition to strike the fetters from the ulcerated 
limbs of the Catholics — he was Mr. O'Connell's firm friend, and his leading 
counsel in all matters of personal difficulty ; and the liberator has at all times 
avowed his belief that a more just and honorable man than Perrin did not ex- 
ist. In the British parliament he has represented Dublin, Monaghan, and 
Cashel, and is now over sixty years of age. 



REV. ADAM CLARKE, LL. D. 

This eminent author and preacher, and profound oriental scholar, was born 
either in 1760, '61, or '62, (he did not know which,) at Moybeg, in the county 
of Londonderry, Ireland. Some authorities fix the date of his birth at 1763, 
and no one can wonder that the learned dispute whether Ossian and Fingal 
were of Irish or Scotch birth, when this learned doctor, who lived over 1000 
years after them, could not ascertain how old he was. His mother was from 
Scotland. Under Wesley, Dr. Clarke became a successful minister of the 
Methodist connexion, and was a very voluminous writer. Among his works 
are the Bibliographical Dictionary, and a Commentary on the Bible. He 
married Miss Cooke, of Trowbridge, England, 17th April, 1788 ; was of old 
whig or liberal politics, leaning toward republicanism, and died of cholera, 
August 26th, 1S32. He was selected by the government of England to super- 
intend the reprinting of Rymer's Foedera, with many additions, a most diffi- 
cult undertaking. 

He had twelve children, of whom three sons and three daughters survived 
his death. One of the last acts of his life was the establishment of some 
schools in Ulster. He was buried in the Wesleyan Chapel, City R.oad, Lon- 
don, in the vault next to that in which the ashes of the late John Wesley 
moulder in repose. He presided on three several occasions in the English 
Methodist Conference, and thrice in the Irish Conference. 

What nation on earth has produced more usefully-learned men than Ireland, 
considering its numbers ? Have some Americans forgotten what this Union 
■owes to Allison and other Irish teachers of an age gone by, from whom so 
many of the best and bravest of our revolutionary fathers formed their sen- 
timents ? Have they heard of Robert Fulton, Maria Edgeworth, Jonathan 
Swift, Robert Boyle, Richard Kirwan, Adam Clarke, R. B. Sheridan, Sir Rich- 
ard Steele, Archbishop Usher, James Doyle, Bishop Berkeley, Edmund Burke, 



G DR. D07LE — COM.MODORE JOHN BARRY. 

Daniel O'Connell, Sir Philip and Dr. Francis, David Ramsay, Elizabeth and 
Anthony Hamilton, Sheridan Enqwles, Lady Morgan, of Drennan, Roscom- 
mon, Denhavn, Brownson, O'Sullivan, Gongreve, Farquhar, Hutchinson, the 
O'Connors, Lever, Lover, Lardner, Maxwell, Parnell, Phillips, Sloane, 
Sterne, Williamson, Wood, Shiel, and a thousand other names known to 
fame? Where i.- the American not recreant to the principles of '76 who 
would not feel proud to call the distinguished persons I have named, his 
I'ountrymen and countrywomen ? 



DR. DOYLE, BISHOP OF KILDARE. 

The Right Reverend James Doyle, Bishop of Kildare and Leighlin, an em- 
inent, eloquent, truly sincere minister of the Roman Catholic Church — one of 
Ireland's noblest, puresi patriots, and firmest and most disinterested friends — 
was a native of that country — descended from an ancient and honorable fam- 
ily — and died at Carlow, June loth, 1S34. He was educated at the University 
of Coimbra in Portugal, and the youngest man who had ever obtained the rank 
of bishop in his church in Ireland. His able and manly defence of Catholicism, 
in answer to Magee and others, and his anxiety to better the condition, and 
increase the happiness of his countrymen, endeared him to the Irish, while his 
great learning, and the noble purposes to which it was applied, entitle him to 
be regarded as one among the ablest friends of his country. He was a strong 
advocate for a system of laws, which should compel the rich to maintain the 
destitute poor, instead of carrying millions of dollars to other lands to be ex- 
pended in useless luxury. Mr. O'Connell, at one time adopted his views of a 
poor law, but on mature reflection dissented from them, and in reply to a most 
severe and sarcastic letter from Dr. Doyle, denounced consistency as a " rascally 
doctrine." Dr. Doyle never had the command of money, and died not worth 
a farthing, devoting the greater part of his income to the poor, and his house 
and books to his successor. How different this course was from that of those 
protestant Irish bishops who hoard up millions of dollars, plundered from the 
poor, and devise their ill-gotten wealth, to unprincipled profligates or pamper- 
ed absentees! 



COMMODORE JOHN BARRY. 

Commodore Barry was born in Wexford, Ireland, (where his father was a 
farmer,) and commanded the first war vessel commissioned by the United States 
Congress. He was a bold and brave man, and a successful officer, and is termed 
the father of our navy. Lord Howe offered him twenty thousand guineas, 
and the command of the best frigate in the British navy, if he would leave 
the Yankees, but an honest Irishman cannot be bought. 

In February, 17S1, he sailed in the frigate Alliance from Boston, carrying Col. 
Laurens on his embassy to France. On his return he fought the war vessel 
Atalanta and her consort, the brig Trespass, and made them both strike their 
colors. He was dangerously wounded, but soon sailed again for France, with 
Lafayette and Count Noailles, and fought an enemy's vessel on his return. 
Under the elder Adams' administration he superintended the building of the 
United States frigate. 

While cruising in the West Indies, he was hailed by a British frigate with 
"What ship is that?" The revolutionary veteran grasping his trumpet, re- 
plied, " The frigate United States, commanded by one saucy Jack Barry, half 
• an Irishman, half a Yankee. Who are you V 

Commodore Barry died and was buried in Philadelphia. The inscription 
on his tomb, which is in St. Mary's (catholic) burial ground, is as follows ; 

" Let the patriot, the soldier, and the Christian, who visit these mansions of 



JUDGE CRAMPTON — REV. THEOBALD MATHEW. 7 

the dead, view this monument with respeel ; beneath are deposited the re- 
mains of John Barry. He was born in the Countj of Wexford, in Ireland,hut 
America was the object of his patriotism, and the theatre of his usefulness 

and honor. In ihe revolutionary war which established the independence of 
the United States^ he bore the commission of a Captain in their infant navy: 
• ml afterward became its Commander in Chief. He fought often and once 
bled in the cause of Freedom, but his habits of war did nol lessen in him the 
ml virtues which adorn private life. Ifewas gentle, kind, just and char- 
itable, and apt less beloved by his family and his friends than by his grateful 
country. It) a full belief of the doctrines of the gospel he calmly resigned his 
soul into the arms of his Redeemer, on the 13th of September, 1803, in the 
59ih year of his age. His affectionate widow hath caused this marble to be 
erected, to perpetuate his name after the hearts of his fellow citizens have 
ceased to be the living records of his public and private virtues." 

Well may the Louisville (Kentucky) Advertiser, as it reviews the past, ex- 
claim, that it was " emigrant blood and the valor of generous foreigners which 
insured success to our revolution." As a Catholic, Commodore Barry had 
good reason to dislike the English government, for its laws in his time against 
Irish Catholics were very cruel indeed. By the 8th of Anne, no Catholic in 
Ireland was allowed to instruct or educate any other Catholic. By the 7th, 
William 3d, no papist was permitted to be sent out of Ireland to be educated — 
by 12th George 1st, any Catholic priest was to be hanged for marrying a Cath- 
olic to a Protestant — by 2d Anne, Catholic clergymen coming into Ireland 
to preach to Catholics were to be hanged— by 7th George 2d, any attorney 
marrying a Catholic was to be degraded from his profession — by another stat- 
ute, no papist was alloiced to ride a horse worth over 51. — by 29th George 2d, 
barristers and attorneys were obliged to waive their privilege and betray their 
clients if Catholics — and by 9th George 2d, papists residing in Ireland were 
bound to make good to protestants all losses sustained by the privateers of any 
Catholic king ravaging the Irish coasts ! 



JUDGE CRAMPTON. 

Philip Cecil Crampton, one of the justices of the Court of Queen's Bench 
in Ireland, was born in Connaught, entered Dublin College in 1797, and was 
called to the bar in 1S1G. He has a mild address, a prepossessing appearance, 
fluency of speech, and was always friendly to "moderate reform" and cathol- 
ic emancipation. When Lord Grey and the " very moderate " reformers of old 
abuses called whigs, came into office in England, Mr. Crampton, was made 
Solicitor General, got a seat in the Commons for an English borough, drew up 
the Irish Reform bill, (not a very liberal one certainly,) and defended the pow- 
er who had made him a placeman, against O'Connell and Feargus O'Con- 
nor on the one side, and Peel and Wetherell on the other. Of course his sit- 
uation was uncomfortable, but the whigs rewarded him by a seat on the Bench 
a day or two before they lost their power. In early life Judge Crampton ac- 
quired great distinction in the sciences; but his crowning merit in my opiniou, 
is the fact that he was the originator of the great temperance movement in 
Ireland — in that glorious field he preceded Father Mathew by many years, and 
sowed the good seed for that philanthropic reaper. 

The state trials in which Mr. O'Connell and some of his friends are defen- 
dants, were to take place in January, 1844, before Chief Justice Pennefather, 
and Judges Burton, Crampton, and Perrin. 

REV. THEOBALD MATHEW. 

This wonderful man is a native of Cork, his place of residence — a sincere 
friend to the liberties of his country — a pious and truly disinterested minister 



8 RICHARD BRINSLEY SHERIDAN. 

of the Roman Catholic faith — as regards slavery, an aboliiionist — and the 
great and very successful apostle of sobriety and temperance in the Emerald 
He heartily approves of O'Connell's movements, which he powerfully 
supports by his exertions to banish intemperance — is an energetic promoter 
of the efforts recently made to educate the whole people — an active repealer — 
and opposed to Lord Brougham's scheme for pensioning the Irish Catholic 
Clergy. 

I take the following particulars relative to Father Mathew from Kohl's 
Tour in Ireland in 1842. 

Mr. Kohl saw Father M. at the Temperance Hall,Kilrush — five millions of 
the Irish had taken the temperance pledge at his hands since he instituted 
the Irish Temperance Association, April 10, 1S3S, which was nearly 3,000 a day 
on the average of the whole five years. He is a handsome man, of imposing 
appearance, well built and proportioned, and about the same height and figure 
as Napoleon. His countenance is fresh and beaming with health, his move- 
ments and address are simple and unaffected, his features regular and full of 
mildness with firmness, his forehead is straight, high, and commanding, his 
nose aquiline ; and although fifty-four years old, he is in full possession of 
mental and bodily vigor. Father Mathew has a fine and delicate hand,, 
dresses elegantly, and is eloquent, with a clear voice, a glowing zeal, and a 
firm conviction of the sacredness of his cause. 

The progress of Irishmen and their descendants, in every land, under every 
form of government, and in every species of human pursuit, is indeed onward 
and speedy. We hear a great deal about the Saxon race in the United States 
Senate. Where or in what are they ahead of their Celtic brethren ? Observe 
the march toward power, trust, and confidence, of such Irishmen as O'Connell, 
Mathew, Macartney, Kavanagh, the Clarkes, Kilmaine, Kilwarden, Crawford, 
Dalton, Donoughmore, Dillon, Barry, Brady, Burke, Shelburne, Shiel, Welling- 
ton, Wellesley, Parnell, Plunkett, O'Higgins, O'Reilly, Lally, Lawless, and 
Avonmore, within the last century. 

While less manly, less courageous nations, have patiently borne the yoke 
of the spoiler, Ireland has never ceased to press forward toward independence. 
The struggles at Aughrim and the Boyne, the terrible days of 1798, the efforts 
for a repeal of the Union with England, are evidences that Ireland prizes 
rational liberty, and that she deserves to be free. Where in America do we 
find more effective friends of free institutions than among our Irish fellow- 
citizens ? We may strive to repudiate the debt America owes to Ireland — we 
may follow the example of other repudiators, get up native societies, and 
abuse a generous creditor — but mighty as are our people, strong and powerful 
if united, it is very unlikely that in the present age they will be able to pay 
the debt our country owes to Irish Literature, Science, Valor, and improve- 
ment in the useful arts. 



RICHARD BRINSLEY SHERIDAN. 

This brilliant genius, and enlightened statesman, perhaps the most splendid 
and effective orator whose wit and eloquence ever adorned the British Senate 
Chamber, died in London, July 7th, 1816. He was born in Dublin in Sept. r 
1751, but on what day his biographer, Moore, is unable to tell. His father 
and grandfather were men of learning and genius — his mother, Frances 
Sheridan, a fascinating novelist. Mr. S. himself was a brilliant orator, of 
splendid imaginative power, as were his countrymen Curran, Grattan, Burke r 
and Plunkett — to the Union he was much opposed, as also to negro slavery — 
his patriotism was his ruin ; had he sincerely joined the tories, like Lord 
Chancellor Plunkett, a pension and a peerage would have been his. As a 
statesman, legislator, and author, his name will go down to posterity with 
honor. His speeches, and his "School for Scandal," "Duenna," "Critic,'*' 
" Rivals," &c, are deservedly very popular. In his latter years he suffered 



JOHN AND HENRY SHEARES. 9 

great poverty, and died with, the bailiff close by ready to drag him to a dun- 
geon. Like'Wolsey, he was deserted by George the 4th, the prince he had so 
faithfullj served ; and the nobility, of whose hollow circles he had for many 
years been the ornament, shunned his dying couch. The ignorant mob and 
vulgar great are alike forgetful of friends and benefactors — Burns learned 
i hat before Sheridan ; and Moore's lines on the latter s dying moments should 
be imprinted on the soul of every true friend of the principle of democracy : 

Oh it sickens the heart to see bosoms so hollow, 

And friendships so false in the great and high-born — 

To think what a long line of Titles may follow 
The relics of him who died friendless and lorn ! 

How proud they can press to the funeral array 

Of him whom they shunned in his sickness and sorrow — 

How bailiffs may seize the last blanket to-day, 
Whose pall shall be held up by Nobles to-morrow. 



JOHN AND HENRY SHEAEES. 

These affectionate brothers, illustrious martyrs for the cause of their coun- 
try and humanity, were, on the 14th of July, 179S, publicly executed in Dub- 
lin. Their father, Mr. H. Sheares, was an eminent banker in Cork, a kinsman 
of the Earl of Shannon, who had 13 Irish boroughs for sale when the Union 
took place, which he sold to the British government at $60,000 each. Henry 
S. was born in 1753, John in 1766— they were educated at Dublin University, 
and Henry's estate was worth $5,000 a year. They were amiable, intelli- 
gent men, of unsullied fame, and members of the executive of the United 
Irishmen, when arrested. Their betrayer was a sworn brother, Captain John 
Warnford Armstrong, of the militia of King's County, who obtained their 
plans under the guise of a true patriot, and perfidiously told all to the infa- 
mous Castlereagh and the malignant Clare, repeating their every conversa- 
tion. This mean, mercenary villain, is yet alive, a royal magistrate ; and of 
such stuff, in Ireland and Canada, are magistrates and judges too often made. 
Here in America it was made very evident, that, in so far as the government 
at Washington would cherish such wretches, the race would be found far 
from extinct, when Canada was grasped in 1S37-'3S, as Ireland had been iD 
1798-'99. On the 20th of May, Sunday, Armstrong visited the Sheareses for 
the last time, shared their hospitality, sat beside their aged mother and affec- 
tionate sister, and near to the wife of one of them, caressing her children, 
while one of the ladies played the Irish harp. Thence he hastened to Cas- 
teleragb, to urge the arrest of his victims and earn the price of their blood, 
as an informer. The cloven foot of treachery crossed their threshold no 
more. The ways of God are unsearchable. This foulest of all spies lives in 
wealth ; Lord Eldon, who was the lickspittle of royalty, and labored unwea- 
riedly to accomplish the legal murder of Hardy, Thelwall, and others, died in 
his bed, of old age. Talk of the torture, the rack, human punishments ! 
Why is it that a creature like Armstrong, so infinitely baser than our worst 
ideas of a demon, was ever created ? Judas Iscariot was but a third-rate 
villain when compared with Armstrong, who actually visited his victims in 
prison, to condole with them, and pump them; nor did they once suspect 
him. He professed to disbelieve in a hereafter. Upon his evidence ALONE, 
discredited powerfully by other testimony, a packed orange jury found the 
brothers guilty — they clasped each other in their arms — were ordered for ex- 
ecution — their families shed bitter tears — Henry's ten children had seen their 
poor father leave his dwelling never to return ! — poor innocents ! — but Judas 
Armstrong clutched the gold — Captain Clibborn, his accomplice, had a bribe of 
£500 from the secret service money — and the sun on July the 14th, saw these 
hellish monsters rejoicing over the ruin they had caused, while for the noble 



10 MAJOR GENERAL JAMES CLINTON — EDMUND BURKE. 

brothers Sheares it would rise no more. They were hanged, and then the 
hangman chopped their heads off, Armstrong looking on. It was in these 
days, and for loyalty to the heartless Saxon aristocracy who inflicted these 
cruelties, that James Buchanan's services to the Castlereagh gang were 
thought woriliy of note—they were remembered, by a Consulate. Where is 
Clibborn ? Js he in America i 

The brothers Sheares were born in Cork, and were members of the Protestant 
Episcopal Church. During the trial the elder brother begged hard that his 
brother might be spared, but Toler (Norbury) urged their execution the day after 
trial, and it was so ordered. Well might Tone exclaim, "Unhappy is the 
Man and the Nation whose destiny depends on the will of another!" 



*MAJOR GENERAL JAMES CLINTON. 

This gentleman, the son of Col. Charles, and the brother of Governor 
George Clinton, was born on the 9th of August, 1736, and died on the 22d of 
December, 1812, aged 75 years. Both his parents were from Longford, in 
Ireland — his wife's name was Mary DeWitt, and his third son, DeWitt Clin- 
ton, became a candidate for the office of President, immediately before his 
father's death. 

James Clinton accompanied the brave Montgomery to the siege of Quebee, 
in 1775 — fought with courage, skill, and perseverance, on the side of " a coun- 
try all our own," during the waTof the revolution — joined Sullivan in his dan- 
gerous campaign of 1779 against the British, and northwestern Indians — at- 
tained the rank of Major General in the armies of the Union — and was blessed 
Avith long life to see his country become a great and powerful nation. 

His eldest daughter, Mrs. Mary Spencer, was married to Ambrose Spencer, 
Chief Justice of the State of New York ; she was the mother of Capt. Am- 
brose Spencer, aid-de-camp to General Brown, Avho fell gallantly fighting 
for freedom on the banks of the Niagara, in 1814, and of John C. Spencer,, 
now Secretary of the Treasury of the United Stales, and who has filled many- 
offices of honor and trust in the Union. She died in her 36th year, on the 
4th of September, 180S. 



EDMUND BURKE. 

Edmund Burke, one of the most eminent, deep-thinking men any age or 
country ever produced, was born at Carlow, Cork County, Ireland, January 1, 
1730, and died July 8th, 1797. He was educated at Dublin University — ap- 
plied for the logic professorship at Glasgow, but was refused ; was enthusi- 
astically attached to the cause of 1776 ; and, but for the entreaties of his aged 
sire, who was a catholic solicitor in Dublin, would have become an American 
citizen. His essay on the Sublime and Beautiful, and other works, are well 
known, and his career in the British Parliament, where he represented Bris- 
tol, was brilliant as his genius. He married a daughter of the learned Dr. 
Nugent, a Catholic Irishman, whose dictionary is in very general use, and 
who wrote an able essay in favor of Catholic Emancipation, but was no dem- 
ocrat. In early life he nobly advocated the cause of American republican- 
ism — but took office afterwards under the coalition ministry, and got a large 
pension, and joined the tories in their abuse of France, Price, Priestley, and 
liberal institutions, about the same time. Nevertheless, he was a great and 
good man, with a far-seeing judgment. 

Mr. Burke was for a time a member of the British government, and in par- 
liament frequently reminded its members of the loyalty of the Irish Catholics 
during the American war, and the beneficial influence exercised over them by 
their prelates. In a letter to Sir H. Langrishe, he truly remarked that the 



CHARLES O'CONOR, TilE IRISH ANTIQUARY — DR. CHARLES o'cONOR. 11 

intention of the laws against their religion '• was to reduce the Catholics of 
Ireland to a miserable populace, without properly, without estimation, with- 
out education. They divided the nation into two distinct bodies, without 
common interest, sympathy, or connexion ! The old code was a machine of 
wise contrivance, and as well fitted for the oppression, degradation, and im- 
poverishment of a people, and the debasement in them of human nature it- 
self, as ever proceeded from the perverted ingenuity of man." 

In 1790, Mr. Burke, in his Reflections on the French Revolution, foretold 
that it would end, as it did, in a military despotism, and retired to private life 
in 1794, on a pension of $5,500. His works are published in 16 vols., Svo. 



CHARLES O'CONOR, THE IRISH ANTIQUARY. 

Charles O'Gonor was born at Balanagare in the County of Roscommon, 
in 1710, and died in July, 1791, aged eighty-one years. He was descended 
from Torlogh, the last able sovereign of Ireland; from Cathal Crovedeaigh, 
whose valor and abilities, admitted even in English history, and illustrated in 
sang, went far to compensate for the defects of his brother Roderic ; and from 
Felim, who, with 2000 of his name, fell at Athunree, August 6th, 1316 ; in 
which ill-fated struggle, the last hope of the ancient Irish perished. (See 
Campbell's beautiful poem.) In his youth, the penal laws against Catholics 
existed in their full rigor; but he, nevertheless, received a liberal education, 
under the tuition of Bishop O'Rourke, his uncle, in the concealment of a cel- 
lar. He became a widower at the age of twenty-eight, and devoted the re- 
maining fifty years of his life to the regeneration of his country. He explored 
Irish history, and made a valuable collection of ancient books. His abilities 
as a writer, his pure morals, and great amiability of temper, secured to him 
the esteem and friendship of Doctors Johnson and Leland, Lord Lyttleton, 
Colonel Vallancey, and most of the learned men of that bright era in English 
literature. He accomplished all that the learning and virtue of one man 
could effect for the fame and literature of his country ; and, late in life, in 
conjunction with Dr. Curry and Mr. Wise, founded the first association ever 
formed in Ireland, for the purpose of procuring a redress of the grievances 
under which the Catholics had suffered for centuries. He is admitted, on all 
hands, to have been a faithful historian, and too sturdy a moralist to prefer 
even Ireland to truth. His works are therefore a standard reference. His 
"Dissertation on Irish History," and " Introduction to Curry's Review" have 
gone through many editions. His memoirs were published in Dublin, by 
Meehan, but I have been unable to procure the volume. He was of the an- 
cient faith, and has transmitted his opinions, religious and political, to his 
numerous descendants. Among these are Matthew O'Conor, of Dublin, an able 
writer on Irish affairs, Thomas O'Conor, of New York, and the O'Conor Don. 

DR. CHARLES O'CONOR. 

This distinguished Irish historian of the present century, was a grandson 
of the celebrated antiquary of his name, and brother of the late O'Conor Don, 
M. P. for the County of Roscommon. He was a Catholic priest, and was for 
many years chaplain to Lady Buckingham, and librarian of the Duke's mag- 
nificent and costly collection at Stowe. His literary labors are numerous and 
extensive, and evince vast labor and research. Among them are " The Let- 
ters of Columbanus," 2 vols. 8vo., " A Narrative of the most interesting 
events in Modern Irish History," Svo., and " Bibliotheca Ms. Stowensis," 2 
vols., 4to. The last and most important is his " Rerum Hibernicarum Scrip- 
tcres Veleres," four ponderous quarto volumes in Latin, which throw great 
light upon the ancient history of Ireland. 

His Letters of Columbanus drew down upon him heavy censures from 
Plowden, who devoted a whole volume to vehement satire and invective 
against "the most learned doctor," as he styles him. Dr. O'Conor died on 
Iks 29th of Julv, 1828, at his brother's seat at Balanagare. 



12 DEAN SWIFT— OLIVER GOLDSMITH. 

DEAN SWIFT. 

Dr. Jonathan Swift, Dean of St. Patrick's Dublin, was born on St. An- 
drew's day, 30th of Nov., 1667, at Cashel in the county of Tipperary, Ireland 
— he was descended of a very respectable family, but his father died before 
his birth, his mother was in indigent circumstances, and he soon tasted of ad- 
versity. Dr. Swift was a man of great learning, and infinite wit and humor. 
His numerous writings are much read and admired. Two years before his 
death he lost his reason, and died in furious lunacy, Oct. 19th, 1745, aged 78. 
Dr. Swift was a true friend of his oppressed country, but lacked candor as a 
politician, and kindness of heart as a man, as his memoirs too truly show. 
His works were edited by Sir Walter Scott, with an account of his life, and 
published in 12 octavo volumes, about 1815, or '20. His Drapier's Letters — 
Gulliver's Travels — and Correspondence, have been extensively read. Origi- 
nally a whig, in King William's time, he became a tory under Anne ; was at 
one time very unpopular with his countrymen, but lived to be their idol, and 
had ever been their friend. 

In Dr. King's Anecdotes, I find it stated that excessive indulgence in drink- 
ing wine was the true cause of that lunacy which obscured the latter days of 
this eminent Irishman. Pope, too, hastened his death by feeding on high 
seasoned dishes, and drinking spirits. 



OLIVER GOLDSMITH. 

Oliver Goldsmith, a celebrated poet, and miscellaneous writer — the Burns 
of Ireland — one of the best and kindest of men, and most delightful of authors 
— was the son of a country clergyman — born at Pallas, (or Elphin,) in Long- 
ford, Ireland — educated at the Universities of Dublin, Leyden, and Edinburgh, 
with a view to his adopting the medical profession. He wandered over the 
continent of Europe, often penniless, and indebted to his flute for a lodging 
under the roof of a peasant. His first book appeared in 1759 — an Essay on Po- 
lite Literature. His Traveller— Deserted Village — Vicar of Wakefield— Cit- 
izen of the World — Histories of Greece, Rome, England, and Animated Na- 
ture — She Stoops to Conquer — and the Good Natured Man, are among the 
many enduring monuments of his fame. He was a true " Citizen of the 
World," ever ready to cry, 

Hail to that land, whatever land it be, 
Which struggling hard, is panting to be free ! 

He died in London, April 4th, 1774— but his poetry, natural, melodious, af- 
fecting, and beautifully descriptive, finds an echo in every bosom, and will ren- 
der his name immortal. 

Dr. Goldsmith's works, (like Miss EdgeAvorth's,) are among the inestimable 
benefits conferred by the Irish on America. Their author died before he had 
attained the age of 43, having been born Nov. 29th, 1731. It is said that pe- 
cuniary embarrassment shortened his days. It harassed Burns, too, who wrote 
for £5 to Edinburgh, lest his creditor, a linen draper, should carry him off his 
death-bed to a jail. Imprisonment, poverty, and want, were, in the last cen- 
tury, too often suffered by the brightest jewels of English literature. Thanks 
to republican America for that great and humane effort, DC?" she has abolished 
imprisonment for debt, and secured the household furniture and utensils of the 
poor from the grasp of those harpies who dispense law, but forget justice in 
mercy. 

Goldsmith's first residence in London, after his wanderings on the continent, 
was at a chemist's on Fish-street Hill— he set up as a physician — could not 
live by it— accepted the ushership of a Classical School at Peckham, that he 
might have the means of subsistence — returned penniless to London after a 



CHIEF JUSTICE THORNTON. 



13 



few months— contributed articles for the Monthly Review— rented a miser- 
able lodging near the Old Bailey, the approach to which was by Break-Neck 
Stairs', where Bishop Percy visited him in a wretched room with one chair — 
there as a bookseller's hack, he translated, compiled and edited, wrote prefa- 
ces and reviews, leading articles and squibs — his labors were incredible. Here 
he wrote his "Essay on Polite Learning," and many other elegant and grace- 
ful things, which (as Bell justly remarks) have embalmed his memory for ever 
in the grateftd hearts of posterity. Yiears after this, he became acquainted 
with Dr. Johnson, and Sir Joshua Reynolds, and Edmund Burke and Bishop Percy 
were his faithful friends. He soared at last into gay lodgings — gave suppers 
— and took some comfort. But bailiffs haunted him— small debts oppressed 
him— the fear of a jail was ever before his eyes — his tailor's bills were terrible 
as spectres to romance readers— and the innocent, gentle, playful, warm-heart- 
ed Oliver Goldsmith found a refuge in— OCT 3 "Death." 

Bell remarks, that " perhaps there never was a man who lived in the early 
part of his life by such an extraordinary variety of ways and means as Gold- 
smith. He contrived to sustain himself at different times in different places, 
by playing on the flute — by procuring alms at convents — by disputing for a 
bed and a dinner at the universities — by assisting a chemist — by practising as 
a doctor and apothecary — by turning usher — by attempting the stage (if re- 
port be true) — by authorship, editorship, translations, and all sorts of literary 
drudgery-; throughout the whole of which fearful struggle he seems never to 
have been for one month secure of provisions for the next. 

These were the trials of a man whose genius, talents, learning, and indus- 
try, ought to have been better rewarded. And judging by those principles of 
truth and justice, implanted by Heaven in the mind of man, the life of Gold- 
smith affords one other evidence, were it wanted, of a Hereafter. 



CHIEF JUSTICE THORNTON. 

Of the signers of the declaration of American Independence, nine, including 
the secretary, were of Irish birth or origin, among whom was Dr. Matthew 
Thornton, a physician. 

This gentleman was.. appointed by the electors to the office of president of 
the first republican government of New Hampshire, was a member of the 
revolutionary congress qf 1776, and a signer of the declaration of indepen- 
dence, in November of that year. He was born in Ireland in 1714, and died 
June 24, 1803, in his 89th year. He was truly religious— a protestant dissen- 
ter of the most tolerant disposition — and the epitaph on his grave-stone is 
O* " An honest man." Dr, Thornton served in New Hampshire as Chief 
Justice of the Common Pleas, and was afterward raised to the bench of the 
Supreme Court. But he was a good farmer, and far fonder of the plough 
than of the centre seat on the bench of justice. 

As there are two classes of persons in America — one heedless, another 
ungrateful— who stand ready at any moment in which they may be in a ma- 
jority, to stop immigration, disfranchise thousands of the adopted citizens, 
and permit no more of the people from the land of their fathers to be received 
into the great American family, — I will here endeavor to answer the question, 
so often asked — "What have the Irish done for America and its Indepen- 
dence ?" 

1st. They nobly fought to gain and to uphold it. Look at the list of emi- 
nent Irishmen, and Irishmen's sons, in this volume, who have deserved well 
of the Union for their services in the field. 

2d. They ably aided in the councils of the republic, at the bar, and on the 
bench ; they were the intelligent advocates of patriotism and just principles 
of civil and religious freedom. 

3d. Look at the very imperfect list of eminent Irish authors, who have left 
their works a legacy to their country, to America, and to the world — it may 



14 COLONEL JAMES SMITH. 

serve to convey an idea of the indebtedness of America to Ireland and 
Irishmen. 

4th. Among the 5G signers of the ever memorable declaration of American 
Independence, in Congress at Philadelphia, July 4th, 1776, we iind three 
Irishmen, three sons and two grandsons of Irishmen, to whom may be 
added Charles Thomson, the confidential secretary of Congress. Irishmen 
not only fought for and sincerely advocated the glorious cause of American 
Liberty, but they had a place among that faithful band of patriots who de- 
clared the Union a nation, the cradle of human freedom in the west, perilled 
life and property in the issue, and defied George the 3d, with his lords and 
commons, in the name of the Omnipotent. 

5th. Ireland has given to the Union, and gave to the old colonies, a bold, 
faithful, and industrious population of farmers, mechanics, and laborers, of 
inestimable value to our country. "The fertile regions of America" — said 
Congress to the Irish nation, in its fraternal address of 1775 — "would afford 
you a safe asylum from poverty, and in time from oppression also ; an asylum 
in which many thousands of your countrymen have found hospitality, peace, 
and affluence, and become united to us by all the ties of consanguinity, mutual 
interest, and affection." 

And, 6thly, it is a well-known fact that the arming of the Irish Volunteers 
in 1782, and the ardent aspirations after independence breathed in their mem- 
orable resolutions, tended not less to frighten the English government into an 
acknowledgment of American freedom and a treaty of peace, than did our 
own victory at Yorktown and the capture of Cornwallis in 1781. Without 
peace with America, Ireland was about to pass from under the grip of her 
ancient oppressors, but the Volunteers could not be permanently successful if 
the English forces were once disengaged abroad. Of the Burkes, Sheridans, 
Barn's, and other eminent and eloquent Irishmen who pled the cause of 
America in the British Senate, and the powerful effect produced by their argu- 
ments, I will have occasion to speak in other parts of this work. 

Ireland and America have been mutual benefactors — the defeat of the latter 
would have completed England's means for subjugating the former. Ameri- 
can victories were hailed with joy by the Irish. Grattan, in page 2S7 of the 
first volume of his father's memoirs, thus discourseth : 

"At length, Fate decided in favor of Ireland, and the defeat of General 
Burgoyne, at Saratoga, opened the eyes of the Minister to the necessity of 
a change in his policy toward Ireland. A connexion had been formed between 
Ireland and America ; and the Irish, who had left their country in search of 
land, of habitations, of bread, and for liberty, stood foremost on the side of 
the Americans. It seemed as if Providence, with a mysterious and final 
justice, employed those Irish bands whom British government banished from 
home, to turn back upon her, and take from the arrogance of her brow the 
palm of empire. The result of this defeat was felt in Ireland, and the Roman 
Catholic Relief Bill was the first fruit of it." 

Among the signers of the Declaration of Independence we find the names 
of Matthew Thornton, George Smith, and George Taylor, natives of Ireland— 
as was Charles Thomson ; George Read, Thomas M'Kean, and Edward 
Rutledge, sons of Irishmen ; and Thomas Lynch and Charles Carroll, whose 
grandfathers were from Ireland. 

Among the signers were also two Englishmen, fourteen or more descendants 
of Englishmen, two Welshmen, two descendants of Welshmen, two Scotsmen, 
and one of French extraction. Nearly the whole were born and bred subjects 
of the crown of Britain, ten of them were natives of the United Kingdom. 



COLONEL JAMES SMITH. 



This energetic officer was by profession a lawyer — he was a member of the 
revolutionary congress — a colonel in its armies— one of the 56 signers of the 



GEORGE TAYLOR — GEORCE READ. 15 

declaration of American Independence, and one of the most energetic upholders 
of the republic, lit- was a native of Ireland, and died in 1S0G, aged 93 years. 
Colonel Smith came to America when very young, with his father, a fanner, 
who settled on the banks of the Susquehannah. He organized the first com- 
of volunteers in Pennsylvania to oppose foreign government, and they 
were the nucleus of that band of heroes known as the Pennsylvania Line, 
nearly 20,000 in number, chiefly Presbyterians and Catholics. Well miijht 
Lord Mountjoy affirm, as he did, in the Irish Parliament, 17S3, "England lost 
America through the exertions of Irish emigrants." Some people are anxious 
to forget that fact now-a-da\ s. 

The famous corps known as the Pennsylvania Line in our revolutionary war, 
were ehielly gallant Irish boys. They fought for freedom while many wealthy 
Americans made money at home. Pay, wholesome food, and clothing were 
long withheld, and they mutinied on the 2d of March, 1781. Lord Howe 
sent them messengers with gold, provisions, and clothing, who made mag- 
nificent promises. But there was no Benedict Arnold nor swindling usurious 
banker among the Irish. They hung Lord Howe's agents, and preferred 
republican poverty and freedom to British gold. Very few rich men would 
have acted thus. Christ bids us beware of the covetous class. 



GEORGE TAYLOR. 

George Taylor, of Pennsylvania — one of the fathers of the great republic — 
was born in Ireland in 1716. His father was a presbyterian minister, but so 
very poor, that when George arrived in America, his services were sold to a 
Mr. Savage for his passage money. Adversity proved an invaluable teacher, 
and our Irish patriot grew up to manhood a bold, intrepid, intelligent assertor 
of the rights of the human race — was delegated by the people of Pennsylvania 
to the revolutionary Congress in August, 1776 — signed the declaration of inde- 
pendence in their name, and yielded to none in manly resolution and firmness 
of purpose to carry it into effect. He died at Easton, February 23d, 1781, in 
his 66th year. 

A part of our Irish and other settlers are disliked by many for their poverty — 
but it should be remembered that immigrants have brought into the Union with 
them many millions of dollars in specie — and if the wealthy foreigner is to be 
welcomed, why should the poor man be denounced ! Joseph went into Egypt 
a poor slave — Robert Fulton's parents were poor Irish emigrants, yet who has 
done more for America than he ? — George Taylor of Pennsylvania was (as it 
were) sold for a season when he arrived from Ireland, to pay his passage 
money — yet Joseph was of some service to the Egyptians — and when the 
gauntlet was thrown down by the old colonists and their title of British sub- 
jects disclaimed, it may be questioned whether the name of George Taylor 
the Irishman shone less conspicuous on the Declaration of Independence than 
those of the other conscript fathers. 

" Take, freedom ! take thy radiant round, 
When dimmed, revive, when lost, return ! 
Till not a shrine on earth be found, 
On which thy glory shall not burn." 



* GEORGE READ. 

George PiEad, a native of Maryland, and delegate to the Congress of 1776, 
was one of the signers of American Independence. Both his parents were 
Irish. He was born in 1734, and was by profession a lawyer. Mr. Read pre- 
sided at the Convention which formed the first constitution of the State of 



16 RUTLEDGE — M'KEAN — CARROLL — LYNCH. 

Delaware, and was a member of the convention which framed the Constitution 
of the United States, of wMch lie became a Senator,- was afterward Chief 
Justice of the Supreme Court of Delaware, and died in 1798. 



*GOVERNOR EDWARD RUTLEDGE. 

Tins gentleman — a younger son of Dr. John Rutledge, an Irish emigrant, 
who arrived in Carolina about 1735 — was born in Charleston, November, 1749, 
educated for the law in England, and commenced practice as a barrister in 
his native city, in 1773. He was persuasive and eloquent, though less so than 
his elder brother, John; Dr. Ramsay gives him the character of a just, gen- 
erous, upright man, and he had the honor to be one of the four South Caro- 
lina members who signed the Declaration of American Independence. He 
was elected to Congress in 1773, and remained in it three years — took his 
share in the fighting of the times — was three years in exile a prisoner of 
war — and in the last year of his life was elected governor of South Carolina. 
He died on the 23d of January, 1S00. 



* GOVERNOR M'KEAN, OF PENNSYLVANIA. 

Thomas M'Kean's history tells well for immigration — his parents were 
natives of Ireland. He sat as a member of the revolutionary congress 
was a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and for nine years 
governor of Pennsylvania. Governor M'Kean was born in New London, 
Pennsylvania, March 19th, 1734 ; educated by Dr. Allison ; became a lawyer ; 
was elected to the congress held in New York, 1765 ; was president of Dela- 
ware in 1781, and for one year President of Congress. He was once a warm 
friend of President Jefferson, and died at the age of 83, on the 24th of June, 
1817. Mr. M'Kean, like his parents, belonged to the Presbyterian church, 
and was the only member of the revolutionary congress w T ho sat in it from 
1774 till 17S3. He was for 22 years chief justice of Pennsylvania, 50 years 
in public life, and may well be styled one of our revolutionary fathers. 



"CHARLES CARROLL, OF CARROLLTON. 

Charles Carroll was horn at Annapolis, in Maryland, September 20th, 
1737 ; educated in France ; a Catholic ; the grandson of an Irishman, and 
very wealthy. He was a member of the revolutionary congress, a Senator 
of the United States, and the last surviver of the signers of the Declaration of 
Independence. He died Nov. 14th, 1S32 ; and the Marquis of Wellesky mar- 
ried his grand-daughter, who thus became the vice-queen of the country from 
which her forefathers had fled to America to escape religious persecution, 
140 years before. 

Mr. Carroll did not vote on the question of Independence, not having taken 
his seat in Congress till July 18th, 1776. No other name than that of Mr. 
Hancock, was affixed to the great declaration till August 2d, when the en- 
grossed copy was submitted for signature. In politics Mr. Carroll was op- 
posed to Mr. Jefferson and the democratic party. 



* * THOMAS LYNCH, Jr. 

Thomas Lynch, Jr., was born in South Carolina, August 5th, 1749, educa- 
ted at Cambridge University, England, a protestant, a member of the revolu- 



CHARLES THOMSON. 17 

tionary congress, and one of the signers of the Declaration of American Inde- 
pendrnr;'. His ancestors weft from Ireland ; his father was a member of 
the American Congress up to 177 G, in which year he died. The loss of his 
father affected Mr. Lynch's health ; he sailed to France with his wife, but 
they were never heard of more — it is supposed that the ship foundered at 
sea. 

CHARLES THOMSON. 

Charles Thomson, confidential secretary to the revolutionary congress, 
who declared the United Colonies an independent nation, but whose signature 
in that capacity is not attached to the Declaration of Independence, was the del- 
egate chosen by the nation to announce to its illustrious defender, Washing- 
ton, then in retirement on his farm, that he was the unanimous choice of a 
free and triumphant people, to be the first President of the United States, 
under the Consttiution they had adopted. He was born in 1730 ; was a gal- 
lant, pious, patriotic Irishman ; and at the age of eleven, emigrated from Ire- 
land to Pennsylvania, with his three elder brothers — the celebrated Dr. Fran- 
cis Allison (his countryman) was his teacher in Philadelphia — and when the 
first continental congress of British subjects panting to become free American 
citizens was held in 1774, Mr. Thomson was chosen to record their proceed- 
ings, and continued in the highly honorable and very arduous post of secreta- 
ry to the fathers of the great republic, for fifteen years, until July, 17S9, when 
he resigned his office. 

Mr. Thomson's translation of the Septuagint, in 4 volumes 8vo., appeared 
in 180S, and was the result of great learning, and long-continued, deep, and 
laborious study. He lived to the great age of ninety-four, died at Har- 
rington, Pennsylvania, August 16th, 1S24, in the undiminished enjoyment of 
all his faculties, and calmly exchanged this world (in which his great probi- 
ty, humble piety, and fervent patriotism built on manly principle, had endear- 
ed him to thousands), to join the spirits of the brave and free, the Washing- 
tons, Montgomeries, Sullivans, Waynes, Duanes, Taylors, and other good 
men, who look down with complacency from a better world on the scenes of 
former perils and former triumphs, in which they were partakers. Irishmen 
in America, when taunted by the hirelings of faction, remember Charles 
Thomson. 

There are some Americans who are not aware of the advantages our coun- 
try has derived from the industry, skill, valor, science, and literature, of Ire- 
land and Irishmen. Let such take for a specimen of Hibernia's sons and 
daughters, the family of him whom their fathers chose to witness and record 
their most secret and confidential proceedings in the most trying period of our 
existence as a people. 

Of Mr. Thomson's family, his only sister, Mrs. Mary Thomson, survived 
him the longest. She died at the residence of her nephew, John Thomson, 
at Newark, in Delaware, on the 10th of September, 1831, aged 93. This la- 
dy was an infant and left in Ireland, at the time of the emigration of her 
father and brothers. The former died upon the passage, but the latter estab- 
lished themselves with great respectability in the country of their choice, and 
Were joined by their sister when she had grown up. She lived with the sec- 
retary after the death of his lady, until his own decease. 

The longevity of this family has been remarkable : 

1st. William, died in Virginia, aged 93 years. 

2d. Alexander, died in Delaware, aged .... 80 do. 
3d. Charles, died at Harrington, Pa., aged . . 94* do. 
4th. Matthew, died in Pennsylvania, aged . . 91 do. 
5th. John, do. do. do. . . 79 do. 
6th. Mary, died in Delaware, aged 93 do. 

These men, with the exception of the venerable secretary, were all agricul- 

* 93, by another account. 



18 CHKISTOPIIEK COLLES. 

turists, tilled their own lands with their own hands, and were temperate in 
their habits throughout their long and virtuous lives. 

In a copy of the Berks and Schuylkill Journal, many years old, I find the 
following particulars relative to Mr. Thomson: — 

lie was about six feet high, erect in his gait", dignified in his deportment, and 
interesting in his conversation. Dr. Franklin was his warm and intimate 
friend — they agreed in everything but religion. iWr. T. was the third son of 
John Thomson, and was horn in the county of Derry, Ireland, in the town of 
Gortede, and parish of Maharaw, in the first week of November, 17.31; but 
the particular day can not be specified. He came to America with his lather, 
when about ten years old, accompanied by his brothers. His father died on 
board the ship in which the\ were passengers, after entering the Capes of 
Delaware : and by an act of injustice, his property, of considerable amount, 
was withheld from his sons, then in their minority, in a foreign country, with- 
out kindred, without friends, without money, left to follow the leadings of 
Divine Providence: yet they amply experienced the protecting care oi Him 
who is the father of the fatherless. Charles had a great taste for learning, 
and, under the instruction of that distinguished scholar, Dr. Allison, became 
a great proficient in Latin, Greek, and French. 

The writer in the Berks Journal, gives a most interesting account of his 
visit to Mr. Thomson's dwelling, an ancient, retired, but spacious mansion, ten 
miles from Philadelphia. Mr. T's last remark Avas, "Money, money, is the 
God of this world" — a truth worth remembering. 



CHRISTOPHER COLLES. 

This truly practical and sagacious engineer arrived in the United States 
from Ireland, of which country he was a native, nine or ten years before the 
war of the revolution. He delivered a series of public lectures in 1772, at 
Philadelphia, says Cadwallader D. Colden, " on the subject of lock-navigation" 
— and De Witt Clinton bears voluntary testimony that Mr. Colles "was the 
"first person who suggested to the government "of the state [of New York] 
" the Canals and improvements on the Ontario route. Colles was a man ol 
"good character — an ingenious mechanician, and well skilled in the math- 
"ematics. Unfortunately for him, and perhaps for the public, he was gen- 
" erally considered a visionary projector, and his plans were sometimes treated 
"with ridicule, and frequently viewed with distrust." 

"Almost contemporaneously with the personal inspection of some of our 
water-courses by General Washington," says O'Reilly, " the question of in- 
ternal improvement was presented to the legislature of" New York by Mr. 
Colles— and in 17S4 his plans were referred to a committee, who, as Governor 
Clinton informs us, were opposed to undertaking the work at the public ex- 
pense, but willing to allow Mr. Colles and those who might join him in the 
enterprise, to do so as an incorporated company. 

Again, in 1785, Mr. Colles brought the canal-navigation question before the 
legislature, who appropriated only $125 in the supply bill to enable him to 
survey the route, which he did, and published the results in a pamphlet, en- 
titled " Proposals for the Speedy Settlement of the Waste aud Unappropriated 
Lands on the Western Frontier of New York, and for the Improvement of the 
Inland Navigation between Albany and Oswego.' 1 '' It was printed in 1785, at 
New York, by Samuel Loudon. 

In Colles's pamphlet he tells the legislature that his proposed canal improve- 
ment would greatly increase our exports, foreign commerce and inland trade, 
settle the country, enable it to carry military stores and provisions to distant 
places on the frontiers, cheapen the conveyance of goods and give the states 
an inland navigable coast on the five great lakes, five times as large as the 
whole English coast, and of equal fertility. Col. Troup, who was in the As- 
sembly in 1786, mentions that that year Mr. Colles's petition was referred to 



COMMODORE CHARLES STEWART. 19 

Jeffrey Smith anil others, and think? it probable that Mr. Colles furnished Mr. 
Smith with the idea of " extending the navigation to .Lake Erie." Dr. Hosack 
;'!so remarks, with respect to Gouverneur Morris's suggestions in 1800, and Gen- 
eral Scjiuyler's iri 1797, relative to extending- the canal to Lake Erie, that the 
journals of the legislature show that Jeffrey Smith, in 1786, and probably 
Christopher Colles, took l lie same view of this measure before they did. As 
to the project of uniting the great lakes Avith the ocean, Colles was far before 
all others lq suggesting it, and in pressing its consideration on the legislature. 

Educated, honest, patriotic, and intelligent, Mr Colles struggled long against 
the prejudices and ignorance of the age in which he lived. "Genius and tal- 
ents," says Mr. Golden, "much above the sphere in which he seems to have 
"moved in the latter part of his life, could not rescue him from obscurity and 
" poverty ; but it would be ungrateful to forget him at this time. No one can 
"say how far we owe the occasion" of celebrating the union of the Atlantic 
with the great lakes " to the ability with which he developed the great advan- 
" tages that would result from opening these communications with the lakes — 
" to the clear nens he presented of the facility with which these communications 
" might he made — and to the activity with which he for some time pursued 
•• ibis object." 

Colles, an Irishman, was the first who taught in America, by lessons, mod- 
els, and lectures, the mode of artificial highways, by long levels of water in 
canals, with locks — he was the projector of the grand western canal, a quarter 
of a century before it was actually commenced — he was the first to propose, in 
1774, to erect a reservoir, and bring water from a distance into and through 
the city of New York, now carried into effect by means of the Croton Aque- 
duct — he was also " the projector and attendant of the telegraph erected dur- 
ing the last war on Castle Clinton." Society left him to pine in old age in 
poverty — but the grand conceptions of his powerful mind are on record in our 
western canals — Clinton and Golden have done justice to his memory ; and if 
perchance his manly spirit hovers over the scenes of other years, the comple- 
tion of his plans, .and the greatness of the west, so clearly foretold in his able 
essays, must be a source of real satisfaction. It is to me a ground of unmingled 
pleasure to be able, even in this brief form, to preserve a memorial of his use- 
ful life. His portrait, by Jarvis, is preserved in the gallery of the New York 
Historical Society, from which it is my intention to procure an engraving to 
accompany this volume. Colles planned our canals — Clinton, the grandson of 
an Irishman, with the aid of Young and others, carried out his views, and 
made many improvements — while Fulton, the son of an Irishman, devised 
and completed the gigantic scheme of lake, river, and ocean navigation by 
steam, in connexion with the canals. 

My attention was directed to Mr. Colles's great merits — first, by Mr. O'Reilly's 
invaluable sketches of Rochester and Western New York, to which the read- 
er is directed for more full information — second, by Messrs. De Witt Clinton 
and C. D. Colden's statements — and, lastly, by Mr. Charles King's Memoir of 
the Croton Aqueduct, in which he mentions Mr. Colles as the first projector 
of a reservoir and pipes to carry water into and through New York. In 1798, 
Judge Cooper, father of the Naval Historian, offered to contract to do what 
Colles had proposed to carry into effect in 1774. The Manhattan Company 
also adopted a plan by Colles in their water-works. It is to be regretted, that 
while hundreds of millions of the national treasure are wasted by and upon 
our political potentates, Colles and Fulton, and men like them, are too often 
harassed and impoverished, or go down to the grave unrewarded. 



*COMMODORE CHARLES STEWART. 

Charles Stewart was born at Philadelphia, July 28th, 1778. His parents 
were Irish immigrants. Capt. Charles Stewart, his father, was a native of 
Belfast, and his mother, Sarah Stewart, was born in Dublin. The Com- 



20 COMMODORE CHARLES STEWART. 

modore is the youngest of eight children ; he went to sea in the merchant 
service at the age of thirteen, rose to the command of an Indiaman, ac- 
cepted a commission as lieutenant in the U. S. Navy in his twentieth year, 
and joined the United Slates frigate, .under Commodore John Barry. In 1800 
he was promoted to the command of the schooner Experiment, captured the 
French schooners Two Friends and Diana of 8 and 14 guns, also the Louisa 
Btidger, carrying 8 nine-pounders. He saved a multitude of Spanish women 
and children "in a tempest in 1801, after the cowardly captain and crew of their 
schooner had deserted them, and took them in safety to St. Domingo. In 1802 
he took command of the brig Siren, and received Commodore Preble's thanks 
for his gallant conduct in an attack on Tripoli, which sustained much damage. 
In November, 1805, a splendid dinner was given to Captains Stewart and 
Decatur, by the citizens of Georgetown, at which General Mason presided, 
assisted by General Eaton, and the song Avas composed and sung that evening, 
beginning : — 

" When the warrior returns from the battle afar 
To the home and the land he has nobly defended, 
O ! warm be the welcome to gladden his ear, 
And loud be the joy that his perils are ended! 
In the full tide of song, let his fame roll along, 
To the feast-flowing board let us gratefully throng, 
Where mixed with the olive the laurel shall wave, 
And form a bright wreath for the brow of the brave." 

When war was declared with England, in 1812, Captains Stewart and 
Bainbridge persuaded President Madison to send the few ships of war the 
United Stales then possessed, to sea to seek the enemy, instead of placing 
them at New York, for its protection. Mr. Madison invited Captain Stewart 
to become a member of his cabinet, but he declined the honor. In 1813 he 
took the command of the frigate Constitution, of 49 guns, aoddestroyed the 
Picton, of 16 guns, a merchantman carrying 10 guns, and the brig Lord Nel- 
son, and ship Susan. On the 20th of February, 1S14, the Constitution fell in 
with the British war-ship Levant, of 21 guns, and Cyane of 34 guns, and 
after an engagement of forty minutes in the night, the American arms were 
victorious, and the British ships surrendered. 

After giving an account of this important sea-fight, Mr. Cooper, in his Naval 
History, remarks : " For a night action, the execution on both sides, was un- 
usual, the enemy firing much better than common. The Constitution was 
hulled oftener during this engagement than in both her previous battles, 
though she suffered less in her crew than in the combat with the Java. She 
had not an officer hurt. 

" The manner in which Captain Stewart handled his ship on this occasion, 
excited much admiration among nautical men, it being unusual for a single 
vessel to engage two enemies and escape being raked. So far from this oc- 
curring to the Constitution, however, she actually raked both her opponents, 
and the manner in which she backed and filled in the smoke — forcing her two 
antagonists down to leeward, when they were endeavoring to cross her stern 
or forefoot — is among the most brilliant manoeuvring in naval annals." 

After his return to the United States, the councils of New York honored 
Captain Stewart with the freedom of the city, presented him with a gold snuff- 
box, and gave him a public dinner. On his arrival in Philadelphia, the legis- 
lature of his native state, Pennsylvania, passed a vote of thanks for his bril- 
liant victory, and directed the governor to cause a gold-hilted sword to be pre- 
sented to him, in testimony of their sense of his distinguished merits in cap- 
turing two British ships of war of superior force — the Cyane and Levant. 
Congress also voted him a gold medal, commemorative of that brilliant event, 
and passed a vote of thanks to him and his officers for their valiant conduct. 

Commodore Stewart was placed in command of the Franklin, 74, in 1816, 
and next year took charge of the American squadron in the Mediterranean — 
he was sent to the Pacific in 1820, and in 1837 took command of the Navy 



CHARLES LUCAS. 21 

Yard, Philadelphia, and that year launched the great war-ship Pennsylvania. 
He is now in his 66th year, active, healthy, vigorous, and capable of enduring 
great fatigue and hardship. His character is that of a benevolent and intel- 
i man, of much experience, brave but prudent, a gallant officer, and able 
statesman. At some of the public meetings and by some of the presses of 
Pennsylvania, he has been nominated a candidate for the Presidency, and well 
will it be for the country if it never makes a more unwise choice than the 
heroic son of a patriotic Irish father and mother. 



CHARLES LUCAS. 

This famous Irish patriot, who established in Dublin, as an engine to batter 
down the strongholds of his country's oppressors, " The Freeman s Journal" 
was born in 1713, hi Clare County — was self-educated — of humble origin — an 
apothecary that he might subsist— and yet, issuing from his shop, he attacked 
the infamous rulers of Ireland — bade defiance to their enmity, power and 
malice — asserted the absolute right of Ireland to enjoy the blessings attendant 
on self-government — and, being possessed of a fine figure, and a grave, respec- 
table bearing, a commanding appearance, and a rich mellow voice, he did 
more for his country than any other man of his day. He "may be considered 
as the first that instituted in Ireland that powerful engine of popular rights, 
the press." Henry Grattan speaks of his efforts as truly wonderful, and 
hesitates not to name him as the founder of Irish freedom. 

Dr. Lucas upheld the people's rights with unequalled boldness — was neither 
to be bought nor terrified — the citizens of Dublin braved the frowns of their 
foreign rulers and elected him to parliament — the duration of which he intro- 
duced a bill to shorten, which became a law. He lashed corruption so effec- 
tually that the culprits found him unendurable. The Dublin Grand Juries 
ordered his writings to be execrated, and the city hangman was employed to 
burn them — the Irish Commons voted Lucas an enemy to his country — the 
Attorney General attacked him for libel — the Lord Lieutenant offered a 
large sum for his apprehension — the Corporation of Dublin disfranchised him — 
royalty proclaimed him an outlaw — for ten years he left Ireland — returned in 
1760, and was chosen a member of Parliament for Dublin. 

In all situations Dr. Lucas was true to his people — when expelled, prose- 
cuted, proscribed, disfranchised, traduced, outlawed, banished, and when 
elected, cheered, encouraged, re-elected, the doctor was the same unwearied, 
constant, enlightened friend of humanity. He was honest, upright, sincere to 
the very last. 

Dr. Samuel Johnson, who in his later years, like Burke and Mackintosh, was 
very cautious when speaking of popular politicians, did not hesitate to declare 
that Dr. Lucas had been most ungenerously treated. When reviewing Lucas's 
"Essay on the Bath Waters," a work which added to his high reputation as a 
physician, Johnson introduced some portion of his Irish history, and said — 
" Let the man thus driven into exile for having been the friend of his country, 
be received in every other place as a confesser of liberty, and let the tools of 
power be taught in time, that they may rob but can not impoverish." 

Dr. Lucas died in November, 1771, and the wealthy and the powerful, who 
had shown no sympathy with nor for him in his lifetime, followed his remains 
in thousands to the grave. He received a public funeral. The students of 
Trinity College attended. The supporters were Mr. Ponsonby, Mr. Flood, 
Mr. Hussey Burgh, Mr. Brownlow, Mr. Adderly, Sir Lucius O'Brien, Lord 
Charlemont, the Marquis of Kildare, and others of the nobles and gentry as 
mourners ; and the mayor and corporation, in their official costume, attended 
his remains to St. Michael's Church, Dublin. 

Like William Leggett, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and Oliver Gold- 
smith, Charles Lucas died in great poverty. His eyes were closed in death 
upon a family whom he tenderly loved, but whom he was compelled to leave 



22 LORD EDWARD FITZGERALD. 

in want and misery — and it is a curious question Whether the carelessness, for 
I am very unwilling to say " ingratitude" of the millions in every age and 
country, toward their most deserving advocates and benefactors, does not steel 
the hearts of many very able men to the sad spectacle of human suffering, 
and officer the legions of tyranny's steady supporters, while it discourages the 
youthful and aspiring patriot, and induces many a noble and generous spirit to 
prefer the more obscure path of private life to a career under Freedom's banner, 
like that of the manly and warm-hearted Lucas, to be followed perhaps, like 
his, by the unspeakable anguish of witnessing a dearly loved family surround- 
■ death-bed pillow, thereafter to be exposed to poverty and destitution 
cenary age, when.' the many toil that the few may enjoy. 

Dr. Lucas's widow was pensioned after his death by the city of Dublin. 

To tell the sad tale of those great and good men in various ages and climes 
who have lived and died like Leg^ett and Lucas, would perhaps cod the 
ardor of some of these young volunteers for the public press whose services 
are really needful. We want able and devoted friends to liberty, who can 
wield the pen, as much as we do Macdonoughs, Munroes, and MontgOmi tie's, 
to fight our battles. The soldier and sailor receive a pension or other bounty 
when worn out in the service — but when shall the champion of the press, if 
pure and uncompromising, find a refuge from the storms of adversity in the 
gratitude of an intelligent, patriotic, grateful, and united people? 

Can we yet say of Lucas, the worthy predecessor of Grattan and O'Connell 
in the representation of the Irish metropolis — 

Thy grave shall be screen'd from the blast and the billow, 

Around it a fence shall posterity raise ; 
Erin's children shall wet with their tears thy cold pillow, 

Her youth shall lament thee, and carol thy praise ! 



*LORD EDWARD FITZGERALD. 

Lord Edward Fitzgerald, the fifth son of Ireland's only duke, by Emelia 
Mary, Dutchess of Leinster and daughter of the Duke of Richmond, Avas 
born in London, October loth, 1763. In 1781 he was sent with his regiment 
— the 19th — to Charleston, South Carolina, and became sincerely attached to 
American freedom, and zealous to secure Irish independence. For his friend- 
ship to the French revolution, he Avas deprived of his commission in the 
British army, and died of hisAvounds in prison, Dublin, June 4th, 1798, during 
the strike for freedom, Avhich, but for his arrest and death, would probably 
have succeeded, such was bis popularity, judgment, and military skill. 

On the 19th of May, 1798, Lord EdAvard was arrested after a gallant resis- 
tance ; the Avounds he received in which, from Major Sirr, added to hard 
treatment and vexation of mind, caused his death, and Ireland lost the incal- 
culable advantage of the ablest and most experienced and popular military 
officer, Avho Avas favorable to the nation and the enemy of its oppressors. 

Four thousand dollars had been offered for his apprehension, and he was 
found in Nicholas Murphy's house. Murphy was kept fifty-five weeks in the 
dungeon, his house made a barrack, his business ruined, his furniture &c., de- 
stroyed, and he had to give heavy bail. Again, in 1803, he Avas arrested and 
harassed. He applied to Lord E's brother, the Duke ol Leinster, but got 
no relief, and died embarrassed. Had he been a Reynolds he might have 
died Avorth $6000 a year. And yet the universalist Avould give the honest 
and dishonest one common paradise to all eternity. What a strange recep- 
tacle of unclean birds their heaven Avould be ! Revnolds, Armstrong, and 
Castlereagh, side by side for ever with Lord E. Fitzgerald and honest N. 
Murphy. The very idea is profanity. One of the informers against Lord 
Edward Avas John Hughes, bookseller in Belfast; since, and perhaps iioav, in 
business in Charleston, S. C. He sold the life's blood of many of his gallant 
countrymen. Lord Edward married a beautiful girl, called Pamela, who was 



COMMODORE MACDONOUGH — CAPTAIN BLAKELEY. 23 

a ward of Madam de Genlis, and related to a British family of rank. (See 
Memoirs of the Countess de Genlis.) She died in indigence in Paris, Louis 
Phillippe, with whom she was educated, taking no notice of her. 

The bejiayer of his lordship and the Council of the Union, was Thomas 
Reynolds. Reynolds joined the Union, wormed himself into Lord Edward 
Fitzgerald's confidence, was a delegate for Leinster, treasurer of Kildare, 
went to a friend, and for 500 guineas at first, and a promise of 5000 more, au- 
thorized him to go to the castle and tell Castlereagh that the Leinster dele- 
gates were to meet secretly at Oliver Bond's, on the 12th of March, with 
their papers, to organise an insurrection. On that memorable night, the thir- 
teen delegates were there arrested, their papers seized, the day of revolt as- 
certained, and Messrs. Emmet, MacNevin, Bond, Sweetman, and the Jack- 
sons, laid hold of. Lord E. Fitzgerald and Counsellor Sampson escaped. 
Reynolds remained unsuspected, continued to disclose all he could to the 
English power, and received from the secret service money £1000, September 
30th : other £2000 Nov. 16th— on January 19, 1799, £1000— and March 4th, 
,tl mho— also June 14, 1799, £1000— in all, £0000. Another informer was 
Captain Armstrong, of the King's County militia. These arrests defeated 
the revolt. The government deferred their measures, as Gosford and Head 
did in Canada, to encourage and ripen a partial outbreak, and then shed 
oceans of the blood of their betrayed and injured brethren. Michael Reynolds, 
a worthy Irishman, warned the Union against Thomas, and would have killed 
him had they permitted it. 



♦COMMODORE MACDONOUGH. 

Captain Thomas Macdonough, the hero of Lake Champlain, is of Irish 
origin. His worthy Presbyterian ancestors emigrated from Scotland to the 
north of Ireland in the seventeenth century, to avoid the persecutions of the 
second Charles, and his profligate court. The commodore's father was a na- 
tive of Ireland, and an officer of valor and deserved distinction in the war of 
the revolution. The victory on Lake Champlain, over a superior opposing 
force, decided the war in that quarter, and stopped and scattered Prevost's 
14,000 men for ever. 

Congress thanked the commodore for his skill and bravery, and presented 
him a medal of gold — New York also thanked him, and added a present of 
an estate of 1000 acres of land. 

Well they might ! He taught England a lesson on Lake Champlain, which 
her statesmen will not soon forget. The brilliant exploits of the war of 1812, 
were but a foretaste of what might have been expected had it continued ; and 
will make British lords and commons cautious how they provoke a quarrel 
with us, now that our numbers, skill, and resources, are immensely increased. 

Commodore Macdonough was born in the state of Delaware, but was 
brought up and educated in New England. During the last ten or twelve 
years before the war of 1812, he resided in Middletown, Connecticut, where 
he married into one of the most respectable families in that beautiful village. 
The next morning after the news of his splendid victory arrived at Middle- 
town, he had a son born. He was a young man of about 28 years of age 
when he gained a victory on the lakes, intelligent, modest, enterprising, and 
signally brave. He was with Decatur at Tripoli, and volunteered with that 
gallant officer in the bold and successful attack on the frigate, which they 
boarded and afterwards blew up. 



CAPTAIN JOHNSTON BLAKELEY. 

Johnston Blakeley, a captain in the United States Navy during the war 
with England in 1812, was a native of Ireland, the son of an immigrant to 



24 CAPTAIN JAMES m'K'EON. 

North Carolina. He entered the navy as a midshipman in 1800 — was ap- 
points! in command the Wasp — fell in with King George's ship Reindeer, June 
28, 1S14 — fought and took her in 19 minutes — 21 Americans killed or wound- 
ed and 67 English. In his next cruise he fell in with ten sail of merchant- 
men under convoy of a ship of war, and cut off' one of them, full of valua- 
ble merchandise. On September 1st, 1S14, he fell in with four sail, not 
near each other — the first, King George's brig Avon, of 18 guns, he fought and 
she struck her colors, but he could not take possession, as another enemy was 
close at hand, and the Avon went down soon after. The Wasp was afterward 
spoken oft' the Western Isles, and has never since been heard of. North Car- 
olina ordered his orphan child to be educated at the expense of the state, as 
a mark of gratitude, and Congress, in his lifetime, voted him their thanks and 
a gold medal, for his bravery in the capture of the Reindeer. 

The following account of the fight between the Wasp and Reindeer, given 
in the London papers, will afford the reader some faint idea of the perils of a 
sea-fight : — 

" The conduct of the noble hero, Captain Manners, during the late des- 
perate engagement between the Reindeer and Wasp, in which he gloriously 
fell, is the theme of universal praise. After having part of the calves of his 
legs carried away by a ball, he received another through both thighs, which 
made him sink for two or three minutes on his knees, but no entreaties could 
prevail on him to go below ; and recovering himself he headed the board- 
ers, with a full determination to master his antagonist, or perish in the at- 
tempt. While climbing into the rigging, two balls from the Wasp's top pen- 
etrated the top of his skull, and came out beneath his chin. Placing one 
hand on his forehead, the other convulsively brandishing his sword, he ex- 
claimed, ' My God ! My God !' and dropped lifeless on his own deck. The 
Reindeer was surrendered by the captain's clerk, no individual of a higher 
degree being in a state to execute the melancholy office. One of the Rein- 
deer's men was wounded on the head by a ramrod. About half of the ramrod 
passed through his temples, and remained stationary. Before it could be ex- 
tricated, it became necessary to saw it off close to one of his temples. The 
man is in a fair way of doing well." 

Irishmen have fought nobly for freedom in America — when will they fight 
for it in Ireland ? In the words of an old song, 

God bless the whole land that gave Irishmen birth, 

Sweet land of good nature, good humor, and mirth — 

May the sons of the Blackwater, Boyne, Suir, and Shannon, 

Where Sarsfield the brave once drew up hostile cannon — 

Forgetful of feuds — in fraternal embrace, 

Now join hand in hand all invaders to chase, 

From the flower of all islands, Old Erin the Green! 



CAPTAIN JAMES M'KEON. 

James M'Keon, a captain of artillery in the American Army, was stationed 
last war at Fort Niagara, which the U. S. Commander ordered to be abandoned 
to the royalists. " After this order had been partially executed, (says Charles 
0' Conor in a recent speech, delivered at the celebration of the Friendly Sons 
of Erin,) the hero of my story, though a subordinate officer, became indignant 
at what he deemed its pusillanimity. The gallant spirit of the Irish warrior 
burned in his bosom too fiercely to be repressed : he demanded leave to remain 
with twenty-five men, promising to defend the fort or die in the attempt. His 
request was of course granted. With this small force, he kept up so well di- 
rected and so steady a fire that the enemy, deceived as to his force, were de- 
terred from attempting to cross the river ; and the post was protected, 500,000 
dollars worth of munitions of war were saved, and the whole frontier relieved 
from devastation by the ruthless mercenaries and savage allies of the enemy. 



CAPTAIN JAMES M'KEON. 25 

He went down to his grave, not unhonored but unrewarded ; and left to serve 
his adopted country in another department, a son, (John M'Keon,) from whom 
that country has often received, and will I doubt not, often again receive, dis- 
tinguished public service." Mr. O'Conor then gave " The Memory of Cap- 
tain James M'Keon — the gallant Irishman who successfully defended the fron- 
tier of our State when assailed by an immensely superior force ; and who dy- 
ing ieft as the inheritor of his virtues and honorable name, our late distinguish- 
ed representative in Congress, John M'Keon." 

In the New York Columbian of Oct. 31, 1812, I find a letter addressed to 
the editor from Fort Niagara, and signed by 35 non-commissioned officers and 
privates. It is an account of the share taken by Capt. M'Keon and his men 
in the movements on the Niagara river on the day of the battle of Queenston, 
in which General Brock was killed. 

" On the 13th day of October inst., we were ordered to he ready for action at 
five o'clock in the morning. At half past five, three cannon were discharged 
from the batteries on the opposite side of the river at us, when we immediate- 
ly commenced the fire from our fort. The detachment of Captain M'Keon's 
company, to which we belonged, stationed at the south block-house, commenc- 
ed the fire with red-hot shot, directed against Newark, opposite the fort ; and 
on the third or fourth shot, we discovered that the court-house was on fire. 
The magazine at Fort George was once on fire, but extinguished by the ene- 
my's engine. The firing continued, without intermission on either side, for more 
than seven hours. Our commander, Capt. M'Keon, at the south block-house, 
of whose bravery, skill and good conduct in the action, too much cannot be 
said, continued the fire with great effect, considering the size of the piece, being 
only a six pounder, until our defence was shivered almost into splinters, and 
would have continued it still longer; but the enemy commencing the fire with 
bombshells on the fort, and having lost two men by the bursting of a twelve- 
pound cannon placed on the north block-house— and being left with only a six- 
pounder — the commanding officer, Capt. Leonard, ordered a retreat from the 
garrison, rather than expose a handful of men to the danger of shells, against 
which we had no defence. The retreat was ordered to the woods in the rear 
of the fort, but hearing that the enemy were preparing boats for the purpose 
of crossing, Capt M'Keon, Avith a guard of twenty men, returned to the fort 
and tarried during the night, where he was joined by the rest of the detach- 
ment next morning. We have to regret, with tender emotion, the loss of twen- 
ty-five men of our company, detached to Lewiston on the night of the 12th 
inst., who were killed, wounded, and made prisoners." 

Garrison orders. Extract. Fort Niagara, Oct. 15, 1812. 

" It is with the greatest satisfaction the commanding officer gives tc*Capt. M'- 
Keon his full approbation, for his spirited and judicious conduct during the se- 
vere cannonading from Fort George and the batteries on the opposite side of 
the river, against this post for seven hours on the 13th inst." 

The following notice of this gallant officer's death is taken from the New 
York Evening Post of April 1st, 1S23. 

"Died on Saturday Evening, (March 29th, 1823,) in the 42d year of his age, 
Capt. James M'Keon, late of the army of the United States, and at the time 
of his death Inspector of the Customs of this city. In every department of 
life the deceased fulfilled the relative duties of husband, parent, friend, and 
citizen, as became the Christian, the man, and the patriot. His courage and 
Buccess in volunteering for the defence of Fort Niagara, when it was abandon- 
ed with a property belonging to the United States exceeding in value one mil- 
lion of dollars, had no parallel in the events which so eminently signalized the 
last war. To his countrymen of Ireland arriving in the United States, he la- 
bored to render free America an asylum worthy of that attachment to good 
government and liberty, which he knew to be their prevailing sentiment, and 
of which he was himself an amiable instance. 

" The friends of the deceased, and the members of the Hibernian and Sham- 
rock societies, (of both of which he acted as president,) and also the friends 
of his brother, Lieut. P. M'Keon, are requested to attend his funeral." 



26 THOMAS MOORE. 



THOMAS MOORE. 

Tins celebrated poet, historian, biographer, and political writer, was born in 
Dublin, Ireland, in the year 1780, educated at Trinity College there, and after- 
ward called to the bar as a lawyer in England. He is an elegant, able, and 
very pleasing writer- — full of wit and humor, satirical, as Castlereagh, Eldon, 
and George the Fourth, had good cause to remember — warm in his feelings and 
attachments — and true to liberty and the emerald isle. His works are nume- 

iu's, including Irish melodies, poems, Lalla Rookh, the history of Ireland, the 
Life <>f Lord Byron, a translation of Anacreon, the Life of Sheridan, &~e. <fcc. 
i'or liir; melodies alone he received the right to an annuity of two thousand four 
hundred dollars a year for life. His countrymen offered him a seat in the 
British Parliament for Limerick, but he declined the honor, considering him- 
self, like Southey, too poor in a pecuniary sense to take an effective and inde- 
pendent part there. From the nation, Mr. Moore has a well deserved pension 
of 1400 dollars a year — he is a repealer if I mistake not, and generally ac- 
counted a good whig and true to the party. He is now 63 years of age, mar- 
ried a Miss Dyke many years since, has a large family, and spends the even- 
ing of his days in ease and comfort. 

The German traveller, Kohl, considers Mr. Moore a more powerful agitator 
than O'Connell or Father Mathew. He assures us, that " Tom Moore's beau- 
tiful and musical verses are written from an Irish heart, and stamped on eve- 
ry Irish brain. They have more power to move than O'Connell's longest 
speeches, which will be forgotten when the verses of the Irish bard are still 
sounding on from generation to generation. Thomas Moore is in fact, a more 
dangerous agitator than O'Connell, although he remains quietly in his comfor- 
table home reposing in his easy chair. His influence extends to the inmost 
heart of the Irish, and he marches to battle against the Saxon with tears and 
sighs, with enthusiastic blessings and curses, with the voice and verse of the 
poet. O'Connell fights in the van, and Moore is the bard who stands by his 
side. O'Connell, Moore, and Father Mathew — this is the great triumvirate 
who now stand at the head of all moral movements in Erin, each occupying 
his own peculiar post. They form the mighty trefoil of the wondrous sham- 
rock, which is verdant and blooming on the mountain top of Irish fame, and 
to which Erin's people look up with loving and admiring gaze. All ihree 
were born in the south of Ireland, and in the neighborhood of the sea — O'Con- 
nell in Cahirsirveen in Kerry, Father Mathew in Cork, and Tom Moore in 
Wexford." 

Both his prose and poetry show that Mr. Moore felt disappointed on a near 
view, many years since, of the politicians of the United States. In a letter to 
a friend, dated Geneva, N. Y., July 17, 1S04, he says, " As to politics, between 
you and me, my dear Hudson, as the man says in the Critic, the less that's said 
upon that head the better. From the moment I began to think seriously on 
the subject, the evil tendency of democracy has become more obvious to me 
every day. America has completed my conviction. If there still lurked one 
latent spark of republicanism within my mind, the imbruting effects of such 
a system in ibis country has forever extinguished it; and I would rather kiss 
the feet of a Mogul or Lama, than be the idol of such ignorant, arrogant pol- 
iticians." 

Soon after the achievement of the revolt in Paris, which ended in the ex- 
change of Louis Phillippe for Charles Dix, a great meeting was held in Dublin 
to express Irish sympathy with the new order of things in France. The Mar- 
quis of Westmeath presided, and the conclusion of Mr. Moore's speech was 
in these words : 

" * * # Nor can I help looking upon it as a most auspicious coincidence, 
that the two proudest thrones of the world should be at this moment, filled 
by two personages who, though born princes, have been educated as men, and 
who, not like others of their class, dandled in the lap of royalty from their 
births, and therefore, continuing children to their graves, have been by mixing 



MICHAEL KELLY. 27 

with ihc crowd of the world, schooled into those sympathies with their fellow- 
men, which can alone conquer in them that inherent vice of kings — the reign- 
m_r only for themselves^ and while one of them lias come to rule over a na- 
tion long acquainted with free institutions, (so long, indeed, as to be hut too 
much inclined to slumber over its treasure,) the more brilliant fortune of the 
other has been to head as it were, in a fresh start of freedom, the people of 
whom lie is the choice, and thus to link his name with the brighest era of their 
annals forever. (Cheers.) A bright era it may well be called, and glorious 
the people who are the authors of it. Here indeed is a theme I could expatiate 
upon forever — for surely if there be a spectacle upon which God himself must 
look down with peculiar pleasure, it is that of man, social and enlightened man, 
asserting thus gradually the dignity of that image which the Almighty Work- 
man has impressed upon him, spurning away the rash hand, whether of priesl- 
cYaft or tyranny, that would deface its lineaments, and doing justice both to 
his Maker and himself, by standing free and undebased before the world." 

Considering the blots which cover the early history of the Duke of Welling- 
ton, it is a pity that undeserved praise is bestowed on him by Mr. Moore in 
his melodies, but who would desire to chide for one error, the bard who is in 
truth Ireland's Byron, and whose long life exhibits him the lover of his coun- 
try, the inspired "minstrel of the Celtic race ! 

"Wert thou all that I wish thee, great, glorious, and free, 
First flower of the earth, and first gem of the sea, 
I might hail thee with prouder, with happier brow, 
But, oh ! could I love thee more deeply than now ?" 

After Gerald Griffin carried to Mr. Moore, at Sloperton Cottage near De- 
vizes, England, in March, 1838, the request of the electors of Limerick that 
he would represent them in the British Parliament, he thus described him in 
a letter to a friend : 

" We found our hero in his study, a table before him covered with books 
and papers, a drawer half open and stuffed with letters, a piano also open at a 
little distance, and the thief himself, a little man, but full of spirit, with eyes, 
hands, feet, and frame for ever in motion, looking as if it would be a feat for 
him to sit for three minutes quiet in his chair. He seemed to me to be a neat- 
made little fellow tidily buttoned up, young as fifteen at heart, though with 
hair that reminded me of the 'Alps in the sunset ;' not handsome perhaps, but 
something in the whole cut of him that pleased me; finished as an actor, but 
without an actor's affectation ; easy as a gentleman, but without some gentle- 
men's formality ; in a word, we found him a hospitable, warm-hearted Irish- 
man, as pleasant as could be, himself, and disposed to make others so." 



MICHAEL KELLY. 

This famous composer and singer, was born in Dublin in 1762, where his 
father was a wine merchant. The family was Koman Catholic. Michael 
studied at Naples — was received with much approbation as a singer in the 
Italian theatres— at Vienna — and in England, Ireland, and Scotland. Was ap- 
pointed by Mr. Sheridan, in 1793, joint director of the Italian Opera, London, 
with Signer Storace. He composed the music for GO or 70 pieces, among 
them, of Monk Lewis's " Castle Spectre," " Wood Demon," and " Venoni." 
Also for "Blue Beard," by George Colman — " Pizarro," by Sheridan — "De 
Montfort," by Miss Baillie — Thomas Moore's " Gipsey Prince" — " Algonah," 
by Mrs. Billington— " Urania," by "Hon. John Spencer and himself — Col- 
man's " Love Laughs at Locksmiths" — " Cinderella" — " The Young Hussar" 
— " The Forty Thieves" — Cumberland's Jew of Mogadore — " Gustavus Vasa" 
— "The Bride of Abydos" — "Illusion," &c. When King George 3d was 
fired at by Hadfield, in Drury Lane Theatre, on the 15th of May, 1800, he 



28 JOHN SULLIVAN — DAVID RAMSAY — GEORGE CLINTON. 

was quite cool. Hadfield was seized, and Mr. Kelly addressed the audience, 
and restored tranquility. 

In Kelly's "Reminiscences,*' which have been republished in America, the 
reader will find a fund of entertaining anecdotes of remarkable persons. They 
were published in 1826, on which year he died, Oct. 9th, at Margate. 



♦MAJOR-GENERAL SULLIVAN. 

John Sullivan, LL. D., a Major-General in the armies of the American 
Revolution, commanding in Canada, was a son of Mr. John Sullivan, a teacher 
in New England, and native of Ireland, and was brother to Governor Sullivan 
of Massachusetts — he was in business as a lawyer in New Hampshire before 
the revolt. In 1774 he sat in Congress — was elected a Major-General by Con- 
gress, on the 9th of August, 1776, and commanded the right division of the 
American army in the battles of Trenton, Brandywine, and Germantown. 
At the latter he earnestly entreated Washington not to expose his life, and 
seized the bridle of his horse, when the royalists had nearly surrounded him. 
He was three years President of New Hampshire, and afterwards United 
States District Judge there. His last expedition of a military nature was 
against the Indians. The warriors of the six nations, except the Oneidas, bribed 
by British gold, clothing, rum, and gewgaws, and impelled perhaps by a 
thirst of blood, laid waste the Avestern frontier settlements of New York and 
Pennsylvania ; their footsteps were marked with the tomahawk and scalping- 
knife, and all property on which the rifle and the fire-brand could take effect, 
was destroyed — of which the massacres of Wyoming, Cherry Valley, and the 
banks of the Mohawk, bore terrific testimony. To stop their career, General 
Sullivan was sent in 1779, with about five thousand men, under Generals Clin- 
ton, Poor, Hand, and Maxwell, who attacked the Indians and British (Butler's 
Rangers) under Brandt, the Butlers, Grey, and Guy Johnson, drove them be- 
fore them, destroyed forty Indian villages, with their cattle, horses, corn, and 
everything that could be useful to them, as far as the army could do so. The 
result was an effectual protection of the frontiers from further injury. 



*DAVID RAMSAY. 

This eminent American physician and historian, was born in Lancaster, 
Pennsylvania, on the 2d of April, 1749. His father was a worthy farmer from 
Ireland. Dr. Ramsay proved himself a true friend to the revolution of 1776, 
in the legislature and executive council of South Carolina, and with his pen. 
He was sent to the continental Congress in 1782, and presided in that august 
body for a year. 

His history of the Revolution, and other interesting works, fill 27 vols. In 
1801 he published his Life of Washington — in 1808, his History of South Car- 
olina — soon after this he completed a history of the United States, up to 1808. 
He was assassinated by a maniac, and died May 8th, 1815. His sketch of 
South Carolina, appeared in 1796. The British Government at one time vir- 
tually proscribed Ramsay's account of the revolt, by prosecutions against those 
who sold it. 



•MAJOR-GENERAL GEORGE CLINTON. 

George Clinton, uncle to De Witt Clinton, was successively Governor of 
New York and Vice President of the United States. He was President of the 
State Convention which met to deliberate on the present constitution of the 
Union, and left behind him at his death the reputation of a firm, honest, ca- 



BRIGADIER-GENERAL AVOLFE TONE. 29 

pable friend of civil and religious freedom. General Clinton, was the first rep- 
resentative governor of New York, and five times re-elected. He was born in 
Ulster county, July 26, 1739, and died at Washington on the 20th of April, 
1812. His father, Charles Clinton, was a native of Ireland, and his great 
grandmother a Miss Kennedy of Scotland. Cornelia, his daughter, married 
Citizen Genet, the Minister from France under the Directory, and died in her 
35th year, in 1810. 

General Clinton was the youngest son of his father, and educated by a 
Scotch presbyterian minister — he studied law with Chief Justice Smith' of 
Canada, practised in the courts, was appointed clerk of Ulster county, became 
a member of the colonial parliament, and sat in the congress of 177G at Phil- 
adelphia. He was present at the declaration of independence, which had his 
hearty assent, but having been appointed a brigadier-general of the army, he 
had to take the field before the instrument was transcribed for the signatures 
of members. Under the new constitution of the State of New York, April 
1799, he was chosen governor. His gallant defence of Fort Montgomery, 
with a handful of men, against a powerful force under Sir Henry Clinton, was 
highly honorable to his skill and valor. 

General Clinton was the friend and confidant of Washington, and was de- 
signated by him as the chief fittest to command the armies of the revolution 
should his own life be taken away. He was hostile both to monarchy and 
anarchy, and as Vice President gave his casting vote in the United States Sen- 
ate against the renewal of the United States Bank charter, in 1811. It is prob- 
able that he would have succeeded Mr. Jefferson as President, but for his 
great age in 1 SOS, over 70 years. Colonel Duane — deservedly very high au- 
thority with many of our oldest and most enlightened republicans — appears to 
have had great confidence in his capacity, integrity, and patriotism, and to 
have been friendly to his elevation to the presidency of the Union. 



BRIGADIER-GENERAL WOLFE TONE. 

Theobald Wolfe Tone was one of those remarkable characters whose 
zeal, talent, energy and patriotism were fully called out, by the efforts vainly 
made, between 1790 and 1800, to free Ireland from her heavy chains, forged 
by foreign hands. He was born in Dublin, June 20th, 1763, and died in the 
prison of that city on the 19th of November, 1798, neither wife, child, parent, 
relative, nor friend near him. His efforts in Ireland, France, and America, by 
addresses, meetings, associations, schemes, invasions, and in every other pos- 
sible way by which English domination might be got rid of, were almost 
superhuman. He was by profession a lawyer, and planned the association of 
United Irishmen, a most formidable instrument for revolt, and persuaded 
France to fit out an expedition which, had it not been captured at sea, Oct. 12, 
1798, might have changed the fate of the emerald isle. Tone was a general 
of brigade in the French service, and might have escaped notice after the cap- 
ture of the fleet, but Ireland's Judas betrayed him. The French officers 
were invited to dine with Earl Cavan, Avhen Sir George Fitzgerald Hill, of 
Londonderry, Tone's fellow student at Trinity College, an orange partv leader, 
and afterward an English M. P., agreed to play the informer, entered the room 
followed by police officers, looked narrowly into every prisoner's face, marked 
Tone, who was one of them, asked him to step into the next room, where he 
was instantly loaded with irons. In a short time they tried him by court 
martial — that is, by officers selected from the army of Ireland's enemies, and 
selected to condemn — death, a violent, painful, and shameful death was their 
sentence — that is, the sentence of George 3d, whose base instruments they 
were. Lewelleyn of Wales— the Scottish Wallace — Napoleon — and the Irish 
Wolfe Tone, were all treated with characteristic cruelty by the successful 
band of robbers called an English government — but the latter anticipated their 
sentence — he died by a wound himself had inflicted. 

3 



30 ERIGADIEK-GENEKAL WOLFE TONE. 

Counsellor Sampson, in his interesting memoirs, gives us the following 
particulars of Mr. Tone's life : 

" His grandfather was a Protestant freeholder in the county of Kildare — his 
father a coach-maker in Dublin. His infancy gave promise of such talents, 
that the cultivation of his mind was considered the best fortune his parents 
could bestow. 

He studied in the University of Dublin, where he was early and eminently 
distinguished ; in the Historical Society he twice carried off the prize of ora- 
tory, once that of history ; and the speech he delivered from the chair, when 
auditor, was deemed the most finished on the records of the society. 

During his attendance on the inns of court of London, he had opportunities 
of comparing the state of the English nation with that of his own ; of per- 
ceiving all the advantages of a national, and the degradation of a colonial 
government ; and there imbibed that principle which governed him through 
the remainder of his life, and to which his life was at length a sacrifice. 

In the year 1790, on his return from the Temple, he wrote his first pamphlet-, 
under the signature of an " Irish Whig," where he thus declared his princi- 
ples : " I am no occasional whig ; I am no constitutional tory ; I am addicted 
to no party but the party of the nation." 

This work was republished by the Northern Whig Club, and read with 
great avidity ; and the writer was called upon to avow himself, whieh he did, 
and became a member of that body. 

He was complimented also by the whigs of Dublin. They proposed put- 
ting him in parliament, and Mr. George Ponsonby employed him professionally 
on his election and petition. 

In the same year he wrote " An Inquiry how far Ireland is bound to sup- 
port England in the approaching war," wherein he openly broached his 
favorite question of separation ; and in 1791 the "Argument on behalf of the 
Catholics," a work of extraordinary merit. 

It is remarkable, that at that time he was scarcely acquainted with any one 
Catholic, so great was the separation which barbarous institutions had created 
between men of the same nation, formed by nature to befriend and love each 
other. 

The Catholics, struck with admiration at this noble and disinterested effort 
of a stranger, repaid him by the best compliment in their power to bestow : 
he was invited to become secretary to their committee, with a salary of two 
hundred pounds, which he accepted. 

He was intrusted to draw up their petition, a mark of liberal distinction, 
and honorable to the Catholic body, as there were not wanting among them- 
selves men of transcendant talents ; and he accompanied their delegates when 
they presented it to the king. 

The Catholic Convention voted him their thanks — a gold medal, and fifteen 
hundred pounds ! 

Being so honorably identified with the great body of his countrymen, his 
next efforts were directed to the bringing about a union between the Catholics 
and Dissenters of the North. In this he was seconded by the enlightened of 
both parties, and succeeded to the extent of his wishes. 

The favorite project of the Dissenters was parliamentary reform — that of 
the Catholics, naturally, their own emancipation. He rallied them both upon 
the wicked absurdity of their past dissensions — upon the happy prospects of 
future union — showing that the restoration of the Catholics to the elective 
franchise was the best security of parliamentary reform ; and how insignifi- 
cant all reform must be, which excluded four-fifths of a nation ! 

In 1795, he again accompanied the Delegates with their petition on the 
subject of the recall of Lord Fitzwilliam ; and, when he resigned his office 
of Secretary, to retire to America, the society voted him their thanks, with a 
further compliment of three hundred pounds, for services which they said " no 
consideration could overrate, no remuneration over-pay." 

It was on the 1st of February, 1796, that Mr. Tone arrived at Havre, France, 
from America, where, with his lady and family, he had been permitted to 
banish himself by the Irish Executive. He had but 100 guineas in his pocket — 



WILLIAM MICHAEL BYRNE. 31 

presented himself to the Minister of War, who referred him to General 
Clarke, the son of an Irishman. Tone could scarcely speak one word of 
French, yet he went to Carnot, and persuaded the French government to send 
the great General Hoche, 15,000 French troops, 50,000 stand of arms, and artil- 
lery, to invade Ireland. Owing to a storm and Grouchy's mismanagement, the 
invasion failed. In 1797 he persuaded France to send another expedition to 
aid Irish liberty, but Fulton had not then his steamboats in use, and it failed. 
His third effort was also attended to by France, but Humbert its general was 
rash ; Tone was taken. His conduct before the English Court Martial was 
truly heroic — he defended himself with manly firmness, and gloried in the 
part he had acted. "Into the service of the French republic," said this vir- 
tuous, high-minded patriot, [I (juote Belsham,] " I originally entered with the 
view of serving my country. From that motive I have encountered the toils 
and terrors of the field of battle ; I have braved the dangers of the sea, cov- 
ered with the triumphant fleets of the power I opposed ; I have sacrificed my 
prospects in life ; I have courted poverty ; I have left my wife unprotected, 
and my children fatherless. After doing this for what I thought a good cause, 
it is but little that I die for it. In such a cause as this success is everything. 
I have attempted that in which Washington succeeded and Kosciusko failed. 
What awaits me I am aware of, but I scorn to supplicate or complain. What- 
ever I have written, spoken, or acted, in relation to this country, and its con- 
nexion with Great Britain, which I conceived to be the bane of its prosperity, 
I here avow, and am now ready to meet the consequence. Having sustained 
a high rank in the French service, I only wish, jf the court possesses such a 
power, that they will award me the death of a soldier." This request was 

refused by the Lord Lieutenant, and the pure spirit of 

Ireland's noblest son ascended to heaven, to plead at the bar of Omnipotence 
for the land he loved, and await in patience the almighty fiat yet to go 
forth, that Hibernia's sorrows and sufferings are at an end, and that the yoke 
of the tyrants of the earth shall oppress her no more. 

Sir E. L. Bulwer admits that " iwo thirds of the army of Great Britain are 
Irish" — and Mr. Tone explains why this is so — " the army of England is sup- 
ported by the misery of Ireland" — or, as the Duke of Richmond remarked 
when Lord Lieutenant, "a high-priced loaf and low wages are the king's 
best Recruiting Sergeants." Had the mutineers at the Nore, adds Sir Jonah 
Barrington, chosen to carry the British fleet into an Irish port, no power could 
have prevented them, and had the insurrection been begun it is probable they 
would have done so. Transfer the Irish in the British fleet to France, said 
Mr. Grattan, and where is the British Navy ? 



WILLIAM MICHAEL BYRNE. 

This gentleman was hanged at Dublin, w Wednesday, July 29th, 1798, for 
the offence of being a United Irishman, on the oaths of paid and perjured in- 
formers. He was a fine youth, and but one year married — juries organized — 
escape impossible. The people often forget and desert their truest friends — 
when Jesus was on earth they cried, "crucify him, crucify him !" Not so the 
wealthy and powerful. Reynolds, the betrayer, had from them, $200,000, with 
$100,000 to his family. This apathy of the people is one of the most effec- 
tual arguments used by the friends of oppression to those they wish to decoy. 
They say — "How rarely is it that the people are faithful to those who risk all 
for their good !" 

The day before this noble young Irishman was executed, the English au- 
thorities in Dublin, offered him a free pardon if he would sign a paper, saying 
that Lord Edward Fitzgerald had urged him to join the insurrection— but (see 
Pieces of Irish History, p. 149) "when the proposal was made known to him, 
he spurned it with abhorrence." And it is the Byrnes and the Fitzgeralds 
that the tories of America would banish if they dared. 

Thomas Reynolds and Arthur M'Guinness, or Guinness, of Dublin, hireling 



32 COLONEL ALLEN. 

informers, were the witnesses against Mr. Byrne. To my surprise, I find that 
a person of the name of Guinness has recently been employed on this conti- 
nent in that line— he is referred to in papers printed by parliament. 

Mr. Byrne was 21 or nearly 21 years old, when strangled by royal authority 
for the crime of loving his country better than life ; " and met his fate (says 
Seward) with a degree of courage perhaps unequalled." 

Counsellor Sampson, in his Memoirs, thus speaks of Byrne's death: — 
" One day, as we were all together in the yard of the bridewell, it was an- 
nounced that the scaffold was erected for the execution of William Byrne, the 
preservation of whose life had been a principal motive for the signature of 
many of the prisoners to an agreement [proposed by government]. We were 
all thunder-struck by such a piece of news : but I was the more affected 
when I learned that Lord Cornwallis had been desirous of remitting the exe- 
cution, but that the faction had overborne him in the council. The terrorists 
surrounded "the scaffold, and that brave youth was hurried, undaunted, to his 
death ! This deed filled me with horror. I had never known anything of 
William Byrne, until I had found means of conversing with him in our com- 
mon prison. Through favor of Mr. Bush, once my friend, and then employed 
as his counsel, he obtained leave to consult with me on the subject of his tri- 
al ; and certainly whatever can be conceived of noble courage, and pure and 
perfect heroism, he possessed. His life was offered him, on condition that he 
would exculpate himself, at the expense of the reputation of the deceased 
Lord Edward Fitzgerald ; and the scorn with which he treated this offer was 
truly noble. ' Go,' said he, to the herald of that odious proposition, ' and tell 
the tempter that sent you, that I have known no man superior to him you would 
calumniate, nor none more base than him who makes this offer.' It is not 
necessary to be a partizan of Lord Edward Fitzgerald, nor acquainted with the 
sufferings and oppressions of the unfortunate Irish people, to feel the dignity 
of such a reply. It would be to be dead to the feelings of generosity, sacred 
even among enemies, not to be touched with it. The more so, when it is 
known that this young man, who was but one-and-twenty years of age, was 
married to the woman that he loved, and had, within a few days, received a 
new pledge of fondness, and a new tie to life, in the birth of a first child. He 
had been loyally enrolled in a corps of volunteers, until the persecutions and 
horrors committed upon those of his persuasion, for he was of a Catholic 
family, drove him from the ranks of the persecutors, into the arms of rebel- 
lion. Had there been men less weak, and less wicked, in the government of 
Ireland, or a system of less inhumanity, he, with thousands now in exile or 
in the grave, would have been its boast and ornament, and the foremost in vir- 
tue and in courage to defend it." 



COLONEL JOHN ALLEN. 

This distinguished French officer is a native of Ireland, and took an aclr. e 
part with Theobald Wolfe Tone and others, nearly fifty years ago, to remove 
its oppressors. On the 7th of June, 179S, he was tried for high treason, at 
Maidstone, England, along with General Arthur O'Connor, Benjamin P. Binns, 
and others. Father Coigley was convicted and executed, but the rest were 
acquitted. Mr. Allen went immediately to France, entered the army as lieu- 
tenant, and advanced to the rank of Colonel solely by his services, which were 
of the most daring and heroic character. It was he that led the storming 
party at the taking of Cindad Rodrigo in Spain, and was severely wounded 
above the thigh when he had gained the wall. The reward of this was his 
colonelcy. He was taken prisoner shortly after, and confined with other 
French officers on an island, I should say a rock, in the neighborhood of Co- 
runna. Luckily for him he had been taken prisoner by the Spanish army. 
Had he fallen into the hands of the English, or had they known anything 
of his capture, he would have been transferred to England to suffer the pains 
and penalties of high treason. He was exchanged, and with others returned 



JOHN o'keefe. 33 

into France, his uniform in rags, and held together by patching and sewing; 
he bad bad no other clothing during his imprisonment and exposure on the 
bleak rock. He came back time enough for the campaign of 1813, which 
terminated at Leipsic. He was in that retreat, and in the horrible distress 
and night-battle at Hanan, — re-entered France — was at Montmirail and at 
Laon, and had still a gleam of hope, when the news of Marmont's defection 
and the occupation of Paris, crushed everything. He joined the Emperor Na- 
poleon at his return from Elba— WAS DEMANDED SPECIFICALLY BY 
THE ENGLISH GOVERNMENT, as its subject, at the second occupation of 
Paris, that its vengeance might be glutted ai'ter a sleep of seventeen years — 
and was actually arrested and conducted to the frontier — for the Bourbons had 
still so much shame as not to surrender him on French ground. The gens 
d'armes who happened to conduct him were soldiers, and he an officer ; there 
was a long struggle between old recollections and their duty; between the 
memory of times past and the delivery of an old officer to the English guard 
waiting at the frontier to receive and conduct him to a cruel fate. This did 
not terminate till they were at the last station of French ground. They lin- 
gered on the road, and stopped for the night at a village within a league or 
two of the frontier. The Mayor provided a strong room for the prisoner, 
which, in their care for security, they examined scrupulously, locking the 
door upon themselves. The night came, the last night before an old officer 
of the empire, covered with honorable wounds, was to be delivered to those 
that never spare. The gens d'armes asked leave to sup with him, and as 
they got up to conduct him to his apartment, one of them said, " Monsieur le 
Colonel, the room in which you are to be confined, is very strong, but one of 
the iron bars of the window is loose. We trust you will not escape." 'Twas 
a hint. At eleven at night be was in the street with a bundle, and his own 
sword, which they left in the room. He made for the Loire, but the army had 
melted away; and after the foreigners had withdrawn, and France was her- 
self again, he appeared in Paris, claimed his half-pay, and is still living. He 
has a small sum in the French funds, and thus can live, for half-pay in France 
is a wretched thing. 

A distinguished Irishman, who was with Robert Emmet in the revolt of 
1803, was residing in Paris soon after the peace, with his family, and in a 
letter to the compiler of these sketches, he thus speaks of his intimacy with 
Colonel Allen : 

■■ Many a long evening he has sat with us while my daughters played for 
him, but never have I been able to prevail upon him to take a cup of tea or 
taste anything with us. He made a resolution to accept no dinners, since he 
can not give one — and to this he adheres so strictly that when we dined to- 
gether at a Restaurant in Paris, 'twas sous for sous. After our departure he 
retired for Normandy, having sent for his two sisters, very old ladies, to live 
on their joint income and his own. I should rather say went for, for as one 
of them is blind and neither able to travel alone, he went to Dublin under a 
feigned name. Who could recognise a man broken by service and years, 
fourteen of which were as many campaigns! Strangely enough one of the 
first faces he met was that of Major Sirr, so infamously notorious during the 
rebellion, and since as town-major of Dublin — but his mother could not recog- 
nise Colonel Allen to-day. He entered Dublin with one packet and left it 
with the next. His sisters had notice and were prepared. This was the re- 
turn to his own home of the man who rose up against tyranny forty years be- 
fore. He found it as he had left it, in the hands of strangers. Everything 
had changed in Europe— nothing in Ireland." 



JOHN O'KEEFE. 

This celebrated dramatic author, was born at Dublin, Ireland, in 1747, and 
died at Southampton, February 4, 1833, in his 86th year. His father was a 
native of King's County, and his mother an O'Connor, of Wexford. He was 



34 DAN'TEL TRACEY— CFIARLES KENDAL BUSHE. 

educated by Father Austin, a learned Jesuit, but showed an early preference 
for the stage. His first production was the farce of " Tony Lumpkin," — his 
next, " The Son-in-law" — then "The Agreeable Surprise," and "The Bandit- 
ti," a comic opera. In all he wrote about fifty comedies, farces, and operas — 
amonrr them, Friar Bacon — Lord Mayor's Day — The Shamrock — Young 
Quaker— The Birthday — Omai — The Prisoners at Large — The Fugitive — Lie 
of the Day— Alfred — The Basketmaker— The Doldrum— Positive Man— Cas- 
tle of Andalusia — Love in a Camp — The Poor Soldier — Le Grenadier— The 
Wicklow Mountains — Kamlschatka — Peeping Tom, &c. His life has also 
been published in two volumes, and a volume of his poems. He was a man 
of wit, humor, and drollery— gladdened the hearts of his auditors, sent them 
laughing to bed — and in his works was the consistent advocate of sincerity, 
and a life of virtue. Many of his sketches of character are truly original, 
and show a careful attention to life and manners. 



DANIEL TRACEY, M.D. 

This gentleman was born in Roscrea, in the County of Tipperary, Ireland. 
His family were Irish in feeling, his father being a member of the United Irish 
society ; and although he was only six years of age when a portion of his 
countrymen struck for freedom, in 179S, the terrible events of that year made 
a deep and lasting impression on his youthful mind. He was educated at 
Trinity College, Dublin, of which he was a graduate, and was for some years 
in practice in Ireland, as a physician. In 1825 he became a settler in Canada, 
where he acquired great and deserved popularity, and was elected a member 
of parliament, of the lower province, in May, 1832, as the colleague of the 
celebrated Louis Joseph Papineau, for the city of Montreal, after a very warm 
contest of several weeks, during which his opponent had the undivided sup- 
port of the colonial government. Vexed at their defeat, the tory magistrates 
called out the British regular forces, paraded them before the hustings, over 
against the polling-place, and ordered them to fire upon the citizens in the 
public square of Montreal, which they did, killed three of them, and wounded 
many more, causing great excitement, as in Boston, on a similar occasion, be- 
fore the revolution. A few weeks after Dr. Tracey's election, the cholera 
broke out, and as he was kind-hearted to a fault, he strove continually to al- 
leviate the dreadful situation of the poor, especially the recent emigrants from 
Europe, who had suffered terribly. The pestilence soon seized him as its 
prey — he died early in July. Dr. Tracey was editor and proprietor of the 
Montreal Vindicator, a journal conducted with great spirit, skill, and talent, 
and having offended the legislative council, a nest of petty despots, holding 
fat offices at Quebec, they sent their officers up to Montreal, who arrested the 
editor, while in bed, on a Sunday night, in the midst of a Canadian winter, 
as also Mr. Ludger Duvernay, of the French paper, the Minerve, and took 
them down to Quebec, where they were confined for months in a loathsome 
jail, presented with gold medals by the people, and received on their release a 
triumphant entry into Montreal, the streets of which Avere strewed with 
flowers on the occasion. Dr. Tracey was of the Catholic persuasion, and left 
one brother in America (Mr. John Tracey), now a wine-merchant in Albany, 
and one of the most generous of men, as many of Canada's exiles have had 
occasion to know of late years. May he live to see Ireland and Canada, free, 
prosperous, and contented ! 



CHARLES KENDAL BUSHE. 

England is a falling power, and her policy requires sometimes the aid of a 
Toler, a Scott, and a Duigenan. It is pleasant that we have to record inter- 
vals of humanity in which her statesmen have elevated to the bench a Bushe, 



john o'neill, ok o'neale. 35 

and a Ferrin. Charles Kendal Bushe, Lord Chief Justice of Ireland, was 
born in the county of Kilkenny, where his youthful days were spent. He was 
a prominent member of the College Historical Society, Dublin, called to the 
bar (that is, privileged to plead cases and practice law, such as it then was) 
in 1790, and went heartily with the real reformers of that period. He sat in 
the old Irish parliament — wrote " Cease your Funning,''' a satirical, acute, 
and very able pamphlet, in reply to Cooke, the Irish Secretary, and in decided 
opposition to the Union, which was carried with hard cash, offices, and coro- 
nets. At length he took office under the lories, and the Marquis of Welles- 
ley made him Chief Justice, in which situation he was looked up to for many 
years, as an able, upright administrator of the laws, without political or per- 
sonal partiality. When Mr. O'Connell, some ten years ago, defended Richard 
Barrett, editor of the Pilot, for publishing one of his (O'Connell's) letters to 
the Irish people against the Union, from a London paper, Judge Bushe pre- 
sided at the trial. Mr. O'Connell, after he had quoted many authorities, ad- 
ded : " There was one who stood in the breach of the constitution, and hurled 
the bolts of his indignant eloquence at our unprincipled oppressors. What 
did he say ? ' Will you give up your country ? This measure (the Union,) 
goes to degrade the country, by saying it is unworthy to govern itself, and to 
stultify the parliament by sayiug it is unworthy to govern the country. It is 
the revival of the odious title of conquest — it is the renewal of the abomina- 
ble distinctions between the mother country and the colonies — it is a denial 
of the rights of nature to a great nation, from an intolerance of its prosperity.' 
Who thus defended Irish liberty ?" asked Mr. O'Connell. " The member for 
Callan — Charles Kendal Bushe.''' 

Judge Bushe died recently, and Mr. Pennefather is his successor in the court 
of king's bench. 



JOHN O'NEILL OR O'NEALE. 

This patriotic citizen was usually known as " the brave O'Neale ;" he was a 
native of Ireland, and had lived at or near Havre de Gras, a town at the mouth 
of the Susquehannah, in Maryland, for about fifteen years previous to May 
1813, on the 3rd of which month, the British fleet, under Sir John Borlace 
Warren, sent 400 men in boats to Havre to burn it, which they did, after a 
gallant resistance by a handful of citizens. Among these the most conspic- 
uous was citizen John O'Neale, who thus describes the adventure : 

" Havre de Gras, May 10, 1813." 

" No doubt before this, you have heard of my defeat. On the 3rd inst., we 
were attacked by fifteen English barges at break of day. They were not dis- 
covered by the sentry until they were close to the town. We had a small breast- 
work erected, with two six and one nine pounder in it ; and I was stationed at 
one of the guns. When the alarm was given I ran to the battery, and found 
but one man there, and two or three came afterward. After firing a few shots 
they retreated, and left me alone in the battery. The grape shot flew very 
thick about me. I loaded the gun myself, without any one to serve the vent, 
which you know was very dangerous, and fired her, when she recoiled and ran 
over my thigh. I retreated down town, and joined Mr, Barnes at the nail 
manufactory, with a musket, and fired on the barges while we had ammunition, 
and then retreated to the commons, where I kept waving my hat to the militia, 
who had run away, to come to our assistance ; they however proved cowardly, 
and would not come back. At the same time, an English officer on horseback, 
followed by the marines, rode up and took me with two muskets in my hand. 
I was carried on board the Maidstone frigate, where I remained until released, 
three days since." 

When O'Neale was borne off, it caused great excitement all over the coun- 
try, as it was supposed they would hang him ; his family were inconsolable, 
and the people generally much distressed on his account. He was released, 
however, on the application of General Miller, who wrote that if the loyalists 



36 THE EARL OF ROSCOMMON — GENERAL HENRY MUNRO. 

hung him, the repuhlicans would instantly execute two British subjects in retal- 
iation. O'Neale's valor was celebrated in verse and prose, and his release 
save much satisfaction. 

" Farewell to the land where in childhood I wandered, 
In vain is she mighty, in vain is she brave ; 
Unblest is the blood that for tyrants is squandered, 
And fame has no wreath for the brow of the slave." 



THE EARL OF ROSCOMMON. 

Wentworth Dillon, Earl of Roscommon, a celebrated poet and wit of the 
seventeenth century, was a native of Ireland, and died January 17th, 16^4. 
Dr. Samuel Johnson considered him the most correct writer of English verse, 
before Dryden wrote ; remarking, that " he improved taste, if he did not en- 
large knowledge, and may be numbered among the benefactors of English lit- 
erature." 

His writings are voluminous — among them are An Essay on Translated 
Verse — Silenus — Horace's Art of Poetry — Ode on Solitude — The Dream — 
and the Grove. Bayle says that Usher converted him to protestantism ; and 
Pope, in his Essay on Criticism, thus speaks of him : — 

Roscommon, not more learned than good, 

With manners generous as his noble blood ; 

To him the wit of Greece and Rome was known, 

And every Author's merit but his own. 



GENERAL HENRY MUNRO. 

Henry Munro was a merchant, of the town of Lisburn, brave, patriotic, 
highly respected by his neighbors, and chosen by the Catholics and Presbyte- 
rians of the north of Ireland to command the armies of the Union. He issued 
a proclamation to the farmers, directing them to pay no rents to disaffected 
landlords, as all such rent had been confiscated to the use of the people fight- 
ing for Ireland's freedom. The Battle of Ballynahinch was fought in the 
County of Down, on the 12th of June, 1798, the Irish under Munro, the 
English under Generals Nugent and Barber ; the English set fire to the whole 
country round : Munro had few or no cannon ; the English a splendid, well- 
served park of artillery. The battle continued on the 13th, when the Irish, 
after displaying the greatest valor, were defeated. The English pursued, and 
like Colonel Prince, in Canada, gave no quarter: The slaughter of Erin's 
sons was terrible. A young lady of Ards followed her brother and her lover 
! > the field in which they struggled for Old Ireland's independence — she 
reached Ednavady heights — -joined the embattled ranks — love supported her 
through the perils of the fight — but borne down in the retreat, she was 
slaughtered by the English, and her gallant lover and her brother fell at her 
side. The fighting lasted three hours on Tuesday the 12th, and four hours on 
the 13th. With this battle terminated the revolt in the north. Two days 
afterwards, General Munro was taken, and tried immediately, by court mar- 
tial, that is, by a dozen of the enemy selected for the purpose of giving a le- 
gal form to cruel, cold-blooded murder, in mockery of justice. "With a quick 
but a firm step and undaunted composure, he ascended the scaffold, evidently 
more desirous to meet death than to avoid it. He was executed in the thirty- 
first year of his age, at the front of his own house in Lisburn, where his wife, 
his mother, and his sister resided. His head was severed from his body, and 
exhibited upon the market house on a pike, so situated as to be the first and 
the last object daily before the eyes of his desolate family." 



LIEUTENANT-COLONEL THOMAS BRERETON. 37 

But who shall lightly say that fame 
Is nothing but an empty name? 
Where memory of the mighty dead 

To earth-worn pilgrim's wistful eye, 
The brightest rays of cheering shed, 

That point to immortality. 

The United Irishmen rose in Down County on the 9th of June — and in the 
Battle of Newtonards, on that day, had the best of it. The York fencibles, 
a royalist regiment, retreated to Comber — took no prisoners — killed all they 
could — and prepared for the onslaught of Ballynahinch, a great part of which 
town his paternal majesty's troops wantonly burned. 



LIEUTENANT-COLONEL THOMAS BRERETON. 

This humane and amiable Irishman's history forms a remarkable contrast 
with that of many English officers, clergymen, and civilians, when in power 
in Ireland. He was at the head of the royal forces during the terrible riots in 
Bristol in 1831, was brave as a lion, but, when censured for not firing upon and 
making his soldiers trample the English in the dust, when, as some little 
revenge for ages of oppression, they burnt the Custom House, Bishop's Pal- 
ace, fee, in Bristol, he shot himself through the heart. Colonel Brereton was 
born in King's County, Ireland, May 4, 1782, and died in his fiftieth year, 
January 11th, 1S32. In 1797 he went as a volunteer to the West Indies, with 
his uncle Col. Coghlan — and had served with high reputation in many parts 
of the world for twenty-five years, when, in 1823, he became inspecting field- 
officer of the Bristol district, and was presented by the officers of his regiment 
with a sword, value two hundred guineas, as a token of their esteem. 

The immediate cause of the Bristol riots, some six months before the English 
reform-bill (an artful fraud) was passed in London, was the Recorder, Sir C. 
Wetherell, who had made himself very obnoxious by his opposition to every 
proposition for lessening the burdens under which Englishmen groaned. As 
a member of parliament, pretending to represent the people, he was justly 
detested. When he arrived at Bristol, the multitude threatened to throw him 
into the river Avon, threw stones at his carriage, and demolished the doors, 
while he crouched and ran into the Mansion House. The selected or special 
constables then made a ferocious charge on the people, and bruised and 
wounded many — a cry of vengeance was raised — in the evening the sailors 
and shipwrights joined their brethren, defeated the constables, attacked and 
carried the Mansion House, from which Sir Charles and the Mayor escaped in 
disguise. A troop of the 3d Dragoons arrived — the crowd cheered them, and 
sang " God save the King" — but refused to disperse. Next day the soldiers 
fired on the people and murdered some of them — the people assailed them 
with stones — the troops again fired and killed and wounded some — the people 
then moved to the Bridewell, liberated the prisoners — went next to the new 
jail, a massy fortress or bastile that had cost half a million of dollars, carried 
it, liberated the prisoners, and set the structure on fire— they next burned 
down the toll-houses and the Gloucester County Prison — the bishop's palace 
was speedily reduced to a pile of ashes — and lastly they destroyed the Custom 
House. These were the movements of a people driven to desperation — even 
the King, when invited to dine with the Lord Mayor of London, in these 
days, according to annual custom, dared not keep the appointment he had 
accepted, for fear of the vengeance of the justly indignant citizens of his own 
capital \ 

Colonel Brereton was at the head of the military, and conceiving that he 
had not received proper authority from the civil power, and being unwilling 
to shoot down people in cold blood, he hesitated to butcher the citizens whole- 
sale. This was his crime. The tories poured in evidence before a court- 
martial of his reluctance to shoot down bodies of oppressed, maddened 



38 MAJOR-GENERAL IRVINE— GOV. BRYAN. 

Englishmen — it was evident that a verdict would go against him, a brave 
soldier of over thirty years' standing — the language used in the court cut him 
to the soul — and the man who could not endure to shed the hlood of his in- 
jured, harassed brethren, hastened to shed his own. He left two daughters 
whom he tenderly loved, dependent on an aged relative — and his remains 
were laid in ihe silent tomb beside their sainted mother, who had fortunately 
gone before him to the world of spirits. 

When, ! when, will England be happy, free, intelligent, and prosperous — 
her tyrants humbled to the dust — and her soldiers not required to shoot them- 
selves for having committed the crime of refusing to shoot down their inno- 
cent countrymen! Poor Brereton ! his history is indeed a sad one — very. 
May he meet his beloved wife and children in that world of blessed angels, 
where sin and sorrow are unknown, and where the great Judge of all will not 
condemn the merciful, nor turn away his face from him who had compassion 
on the oppressed ! 



MAJOR-GENERAL IRVINE. 

William Irvine, Major-General of the Armies of the United States, and 
President of the Cincinnati Society of Pennsylvania, was born on the 3d of 
November, 1711, at Fermanagh in Ireland — and served as a surgeon on board 
a British war ship until the peace of 1763, when he settled at Carlisle in 
Pennsylvania — was a member of the state convention in 1774 — raised and 
commanded a regiment of the Pennsylvania line in January, 1770, chiefly 
Irishmen — was taken prisoner in Canada, and kept at Quebec eighteen months, 
till exchanged — was then placed in command of the second Pennsylvania 
regiment — and was intrusted by Washington in 17S1 with the defence of the 
Northwest Frontier, then threatened by the British and Indians. After the 
war he was sent to Congress, and had a seat in the convention to frame a 
constitution for Pennsylvania. This gallant, patriotic, and experienced war- 
rior for American freedom and the rights of man, died July 29th, 1804, at 
Philadelphia, in his 93d year. 



GEORGE BRYAN, GOVERNOR OF PENNSYLVANIA. 

This eminent citizen rendered good service to his adopted country. He 
found it a distant dependancy of a distant monarchy — he left it under Wash- 
ington a free republic. George Bryan was born in Dublin, Ireland, came to 
America in early life, and resided in Philadelphia. He was at first engaged 
iu Commerce — but in 1765 was sent to Congress to remonstrate against the 
oppressive acts of our imported British rulers. During the war of Indepen- 
dence, he took an active, bold, and very decided part in the cause of freedom — 
and was elected vice-president of the supreme executive council of Pennsyl- 
vania. In 1788 he was elected governor of that state — in 1789 he was unwea- 
ried in his efforts to procure the passage of a law projected by him for the 
gradual abolition of slavery there— and soon after was appointed judge of the 
supreme court of Pennsylvania. Governor Bryan died in January, 1791, and 
possessed a vigorous understanding, a tenacious memory, and an unsullied integ- 
rity, united with long experience and extensive knowledge. He was pious 
and amiable, and ardently attached to American institutions. 



COLONEL ISAAC BARRE. 

Colonel Barre was a fearless, patriotic, chivalrous Irishman — who, when 
England was struggling in the days of 1775 to reduce this great republic to 
the degraded condition in which she keeps the unhappy Canadians, lifted up 



WILLIAM ORR. 39 

his voice in her parliament, in favor of American freedom, and cheered the 
children of the pilgrims in their hour of trouble and adversity. Honored be 
his memory — ever-green be the turf over the hallowed spot where his ashes 
await the decree of bis Creator! He had a noble heart, a true heart, an Irish 
heart. His sympathies were not confined to the palaces of the rich. He felt 
for the gallant men who had shown at Lexington and Bunker Hill that they 
prized liberty more than life— and bis eloquent and impassioned orations in de- 
nunciation of their worse than Egyptian task-masters, will live for ever on the 
historic page — an example for our youth, to warm, and cheer, and animate 
them in defence of all that is true, sincere, just, and honest in the world. 
Colonel Barre not only spoke in parliament, but also sent to the press several 
able pamphlets condemnatory of the enslaving process persevered in against 
America. 

He was born in Dublin, in 1726 — his parents were poor people, persons of 
the humbler class. But he was an apt scholar and a brave soldier. In early 
life he chose the army as a profession — rose higher and higher, the reward of 
most uncommon merit — and in 1761 was brought into the English parliament 
by his countryman, Lord Sbelburne. Barre could not fawn and truckle — no 
right-hearted Irishman ever can. He opposed the British government when 
wrong; they threatened him with loss of office ; he was not rich, but his 
mind was bis kingdom ; he remained honest. 

Of course he was punished. Government took from him the situations he 
held, of governer of Stirling Castle in Scotland, and adjutant-general of the 
British army. They went farther — they dismissed him from the army alto- 
gether. No matter — he persevered. One day, when denouncing Lord North, 
he frankly declared, " that the conscience of the Ministers was seared with 
guilt, and their turpitude unexampled." 

When men's minds had cooled down — Barre's prophecies relative to 
America been carried to fulfilment — and new rulers placed in power — the injus- 
tice done him was thought of, and a pension of £2,300 a year granted him, 
which he gave up and was appointed to an office of emolument, with no diffi- 
cult duties. He died on the 1st (some say the 4th) of July, 1S02, aged 76 
years. In old age he was stone-blind. So was America's great enemy, his 
old opponent, Lord North. They met in Bath, and on being introduced to 
each other, Lord North said, " Colonel, you and I have often been at variance ; 
but I believe there are no people in the world, who would be more glad to 
SEE each other." 

Miss Edgeworth, with her usual good taste, enumerates Colonel Barre 
among those Irishmen of whom their country may well be proud. 

In his first lecture delivered at the University Chapel, in 1841, on the 
American Revolution, Dr. Jared Sparks said, that " Colonel Barre, who was 
joined by a few other true friends to America, and who had himself served in 
America during the [French] war, made a speech against the Stamp Act, 
which may be pronounced one of the finest specimens of extemporaneous elo- 
quence ever uttered. In this admirable speech Colonel Barre first used the 
phrase ' Sons of Liberty,' as applied to Americans, which was afterward 
adopted with such enthusiasm by the ardent patriots in every part of the con- 
tinent, and was so well suited to the popular feeling at that time that it be- 
came the bond of union among their leaders, and produced an almost magical 
effect on the ears of the people." 



WILLIAM ORR. 

Though perjury doomed thee, dear Orr, to the grave, 
Thy blood to our Union more energy gave. 

The immortal memory of this glorious martyr for Ireland's freedom, is 
sweet to the souls of millions of his countrymen. He was a worthy gentle- 
man of Ulster, who loved Green Erin more than his life, and assisted in swel- 



40 WILLIAM ORR. 

lin^ the list of pure and virtuous patriots, who were sacrificed to the moloch 
of !"\ al ambition and lust of power, during the latter years of the eighteenth 
century. He had a mock-trial at Carrickfergus, and was executed there on 
the L4th of October, 1797. While in prison six hundred of his fellow citizens 
cut down his entire harvest in a few hours. 

The inhabitants of Carrickfergus, man, woman, and child, quitted the place 
that day, rather than be present at the execution of their hapless countryman. 
Some removed to the distance of many miles. Scarce a sentence was inter- 
changed during the day, and every face presented a picture of the deepest 
melancholy; horror, and indignation. The military who attended the execu- 
tion consisted of several thousand men, horse and foot, with cannon, and a 
company of artillery, the whole forming a hollow square. To these Mr. Orr 
read his dying declaration, in a clear, strong, and manly tone of voice, and 
his deportment was firm, unshaken, and impressive, to the last instant of 
his existence. He was a Protestant Dissenter, of exemplary morals and of 
most industrious habits ; and in the characters of husband, father, and neigh- 
bor, eminently amiable "and respected. The love he bore his country was 
pure, ardent, and disinterested, spurning all religious distinctions ; and his last 
accents articulated the prophetic hope, that Ireland would soon be emancipa- 
ted. 

Mr. Orr was charged with having administered the United Irishmen's oath. 
Wheatly, the evidence, got conscience-struck, and owned that he had sworn 
falsely, for British gold. The jury were packed, and quite drunk. Truly did 
Lord Plunkett tell the English Parliament, in 1816, " Exile and death are not 
the instruments of government, but the miserable expedients which show the 
absence of all government." 

The memory of the gallant Orr is yet cherished in many a Scottish, Ameri- 
can, and Irish'breast. "His fate is recorded in the popular songs of the north, 
and his gentle spirit will look down from the habitation of the blessed, and 
behold his last best wish early accomplished. 

The history of William Orr's trial and execution, forms an important chap- 
ter in his country's annals. At a great public dinner given to his advocate, 
Counsellor Sampson, in November, 1831, at Philadelphia, he drew a picture 
of royal tyranny which brought tears from every eye. Thank heaven, these 
pages will assist in preserving it, to show those who may be careless of their 
rights, what British government is. 

"Divide and conquer," said Mr. Sampson, "is the tyrant's maxim, unite 
and conquer is the patriot's creed. He who takes this great principle for his 
leading star, and follows its guidance through storm and peril, will have done 
his duty, and however adverse his destiny, his course has been the true one. 
If he has pursued it undauntedly and faithfully, he may suffer shipwreck of 
his fortune or of his life, but never of his conscience or his honor. Such was 
that brave and honest man, who, without pretensions to splendid genius or to 
mighty talents, and of that middle station where virtue is most apt to fix its 
habitation, and with whose honest name I am most proud to be identified — 
such was William Orr. He was no boastful orator — no aspiring leader. His 
love was for his country, and his sole ambition for its deliverance. You, who 
have never seen him, as I have, may figure to yourselves a plain and honest 
countryman : but one upon whose front nature had stamped the virtues that 
dwelt within his breast. And though it matters not what are the outward 
lineaments of him whose soul is pure, and courage noble, yet, let me say, he 
was one in whose manly countenance, fine stature, and fair proportions, was 
written — man ! and let me tell you now for what he died. 

" Among the bloody acts of a ferocious parliament, scourges and traitors to 
their country, minions and sycophants of a foreign and a hostile government* 
there was one to which they gave the too just title of the insurrection act. 
In this there was a clause, which made it felony of death to take unlawful 
oaths. To one not versed in Irish history, it might appear that this enact- 
ment was to punish the exterminating oaths of those called ' peep of day 
boys,' afterwards Orangemen. But no ! these were encouraged, rewarded,, 
and indemnified. It was at the great principle of union that they aimed, far 



JOHN WAIIN'FOKD ARMSTRONG. 41 

that they knew would lead to liberty. Hear then, the obligation for which 
this patriot was c md mned by drunken jurors, perjured witnesses, and. a judge 
who shed vain tears of contrition and compunction, in passing the horrible 
sentence of death upon him. Thus it was: — 

" ' In the presence of God I do voluntarily declare, that I will persevere in 
endeavoring to form a brotherhood of affection amongst Irishmen of every re- 
ligious persuasion, and that I will also persevere in my endeavors to obtain 
an equal, full, and adequate representation of all the people of Ireland.' 

" You have not heard it all. The conscience-stricken jury who found him 
guilty, recommended him to mercy. Some of them came forward, and in 
open court made solemn oath, that liquor had been introduced into the room 
where they had retired to deliberate upon the verdict, and that the result had 
been almost general intoxication — that one of the body had terrified them 
with denunciations of vengeance for their disloyalty — that still these fearful 
menaces against their persons and their dwellings would not have been suffi- 
cient to seduce them to so criminal an act, but for the effects of the liquor 
they had taken, and the deluding assertion that Mr. Orr's life was in no 
danger. That in their minds the case was doubtful, and that they had so 
stated it in giving in their verdict. 

" Stay yet a little, there is yet more to follow. The principal witness 
made a like solemn oath, that he felt great compunction for his crimes com- 
mitted against Mr. Orr, and against others, and that what he swore against 
William Orr was false. A respite of his execution was granted, and much in- 
terest was made, for he was much beloved. Was it through mercy that this 
was granted ? Tt was not, nor for the sake of justice. It was that two murders 
might be committed, the one upon his person, the other upon his good name. 
It was published in the newspapers that he had confessed his guilt. They 
went into his cell and found him in the act of prayer. Mercy was offered 
upon the sole condition that he would acknowledge himself to be a guilty 
man. His fortitude was assailed through the affections of a brother, and the 
tears and prayers, and lamentations of a beloved wife, and five beloved chil- 
dren ; by whatever could bind the affections of a fond husband and tender 
father to a sweet and happy home. Life was dear, for he was in the season 
of its best enjoyment. Children and wife were dear, and friends were dear, 
but dear as all these were, his honor and his truth were dearer still. 

" The story of his last moments, as I have heard it told by those who wit- 
nessed them, was thus : — 

" Upon the scaffold, nearest to him, and by his side, stood a Roman Catho- 
lic domestic, faithful and attached to him. Manacled and pinioned, he direc- 
ted him to take from his pocket the watch which he had worn till now that 
time had ceased for him, and his hours and minutes were no longer to be the 
measures of his existence. You, my friend, and I, must now part — our sta- 
tions here on earth have been a little different, and our modes of worshipping 
the Almighty being that we both adore. Before his presence we shall stand 
both equal. Farewell ! remember Orr. 

"Here the scene closes— here let the curtain fall. I will not lead you 
through the tragic acts that followed on this murder, too hideous to be told, 
too foul to have a name. Let this serve as the epitome of Ireland's history : 
a government, that ruled by crime and cruelty : a government that, whilst it 
dealt death, and exile, and torture, and ruin, to such men as this, allied itself 
with all that was corrupt and vile ; and if I have any title to your favor, it is 
not from genius or talents, which your partiality would impute to me, but that 
I have been, in my opposition to this misrule, sincere and resolute. And 
still may you renieqjber me when you remember Orr. And whilst I live I 
shall be grateful to you." 



JOHN WARNFORD ARMSTRONG. 

We hear a great deal about education in these times ; and if the school- 
master pursue a plan by which men may be rendered wiser and better — more 



42 JOHN WARNFORD ARMSTRONG. 

sincere, honest, generous, and manly — lasting benefits to society will result 
from his labors. But where intelligence is increased by precept, while integ- 
rity is undervalued through example, it would be surprising indeed if Arnolds 
and Armstrongs, Reynoldses and McGuckens, failed to appear among the pro- 
ducts. 

Of the many thousands of peasants who could neither read nor write, not 
one could be found in Scotland in 1746 to betray Charles Stewart, nor in 1798 
to deliver up Lord Edward Fitzgerald to the enemies of their country. Im- 
mense rewards in money failed to corrupt even one among many thousands of 
the very poorest and worst educated (as far as scholarship went) of the people- 
Informers and spies could only be found among the learned of the age. Per- 
haps in no land are the masses as intelligent as they ought to be. In Britain 
and France they are behind the United States — and even in this highly favored 
Union, the officers appointed to take the census of 1840 found upwards of five 
hundred thousand white persons over twenty years of age, not one of whom 
could either read or write! Before this class are undervalued, however, it 
would be well to reflect upon the lessons history has taught of the worth of 
many peoples, who have not in their possession the keys of human knowledge, 
reading and writing. 

Captain Armstrong, the friend and companion of Lord Castlereagh, and the 
most vile and unprincipled of all the mercenary spies and informers who 
were tempted by English gold to betray Ireland during the eighteenth century, 
was, in 1798, an officer of the King's County Militia, and has since been pub- 
licly thanked, pensioned, and honored, by the royal commission as a British 
magistrate. I am told that he still lives, rejoicing in old age over the innocent 
victims of his youthful depravity, in full enjoyment of the wealth which hired 
him. A perusal of my memoir of John and Henry Sheares will afford a clue 
to his character, while the following account of the trial of Hugh Wollaghan 
for obeying his orders to the letter, will exhibit the British government, of 
which he was merely a vile instrument, in its true colors, and form an ample 
apology to the reader for introducing his name. People of America, what 
could be more honorable than to try to shake off a government that used and 
honored such monsters as Reynolds and Armstrong ! Who can blame the 
United Irishmen? 

On Hardy's trial, Erskine quoted a passage from Burke, descriptive of the 
mercenary informer, who is employed to pursue his victim — to dodge about 
his steps — to spy into his privacy — to beset his house, and crawl about his 
path, which well applies to Armstrong. By practices such as these, says 
Burke, " the seeds of destruction are sown in civil intercourse and social hab- 
itudes. The blood of wholesome kindred is infected. Their tables and beds 
are surrounded with snares. All the means given by Providence to make life 
safe and comfortable, are perverted into instruments of terror and torment.. 
This species of universal subserviency, that makes the very servant who waits 
behind your chair the arbiter of your life and fortune, has such a tendency to 
degrade and abase mankind, and to deprive them of that assured and liberal 
state of mind, whieh alone can make us what we ought to he — that I vow to 
God that I would sooner bring myself to put a man to immediate death fur 
opinions I disliked, and get rid of the man and his opinions at once, than to 
fret him with a feverish being, tainted with the jail-distemper of a contagious 
servitude ; to keep him above ground, an animated mass of putrefaction, cor- 
rupted himself and corrupting all about him." 

No better illustration of the spirit of British rule, under the united influences 
of the feudal and colonial systems, a state church, and banking and other mer- 
cantile and corporate monopolies, can be had than the following trial and its 
results. Armstrong and all the other yeomanry officers only desired to do 
what would gratify the ruling powers, when they sent their men out to mur- 
der in cold blood whoever they might choose to suspect. 

Hugh Wollaghan was tried at Dublin Barracks, by a court martial, of which 
the Earl of Enniskillen was president, on the 13th of October, 1798, by order 
of General Craig, for the murder of Thomas Dogherty, brogue-maker, on the 



JOHN WARNFORD ARMSTRONG. 43 

1st of that month, sometime after the revolt was quelled. It appeared that 
Wollaghan belonged to Middleton in Wicklow, was one of the armed Orange- 
men called yeomanry — that on the above day he came to Mary Dogherty's 
house at Delgany and demanded if there were any bloody rebels there. Mrs. 
Dogherty's evidence, amply confirmed by others, is as follows ; she replied 
that there was not, only a sick boy ; Wollaghan asked the boy if he was 
Dogherty's eldest son ; upon which the boy stood up and told him he was; 
Wollaghan then said, "Well, you dog, if you are, you die here;" the boy re- 
plied, " 1 hope not ; if you have anything against me, bring me to Mr. La- 
touche, and give me a fair trial, and if you get anything against me, give me 
the severity of the law." Wollaghan replied, " No, you dog, I don't care for 
Latouche, you are to die here ;" upon which his mother said to Wollaghan 
(he then having the gun cocked in his hand), "For the love of God spare my 

child's life, and take mine ;" but Wollaghan replied, " No, you bloody w , 

if I had your husband here, I would give him the same death." He then 
snapped the gun, but it did not go off; he snapped it a second lime, but it did 
not go off: upon which a man of the name of Charles Fox came in and said, 
•" Damn your gun, there's no good in it ;" and at the same time said to Wolla- 
ghan, that that boy (her son) must be shot ; that she then got hold of Wolla- 
ghan's gun, and endeavored to turn it from her son, upon which the gun went 
off, grazed her son's body, and shot him in the arm ; the boy staggered — lean- 
ed on a form — turned up his eyes and said, '■'Mother, pray for me." On Wol- 
laghan's firing the gun, he went out at the door, and in a short time returned 
and said, " is not the dog dead yet ?" His mother replied, " Oh yes, sir, he is 
dead enough ;" upon which Wollaghan replied, (tiring the gun at him again,) 
" For fear he is not, let him take this." Mary was at that instant holding up 
her son's head, when he fell — and died. 

The evidence, as given at length in Teeling, shows that there was no charge 
whatever against the boy Dogherty-*but Corporal Kennedy testified that Capt- 
Armstrong, commander of the militia, and who was the informer who be- 
trayed the Shearses, ordered the yeomanry when they went out in bodies, 
that " if they should meet with any rebel* whom they knew, or suspected to 
be such, that they need not be at the trouble of bringing them in, but to shoot 
them on the spot. This order was before Dogherty was killed, and he (Cor- 
poral K.) communicated this to the corps." 

Sergeant Hayes, same corps, testified, that " Captain Armstrong, of the 
King's County Militia, said in his hearing that he would SHOOT OR HANG 
ANY REBELS WHOM HE SUSPECTED, and told the people under his 
command to do the same." Lieutenant Tomlinson, of the Yeomanry Cavalry, 
swore that as to the rebels, " it was generally understood that orders were 
given not to bring in prisoners." 

Captain Gore swore, " that it was the practice of the corps to scour the 
country without an officer ; and verily believes they understood it was their 
duty to shoot any rebels they met with, or suspected, to be such ; and he had 
heard that other corps had similar directions in other districts." 

Wollaghan 's character was upheld by yeomanry evidence, as being honest ! 
steady! humane! ("ask my brother if I be a thief!") and the court martial 
meted out to him a very different sentence to that which would have been as- 
signed to the Bambers, had Consul Buchanan succeeded in shipping them off 
to the land of British justice. Wollaghan was instantly acquitted. How 
could his comrades in crime have done otherwise ? They themselves had shot 
down the disarmed Irish, months after the revolt was over, in cold blood, 
walking into their houses and murdering them, as a sport and pastime. How 
could they punish their comrades for obeying the same orders ? 

Captain Armstrong received no censure, but had new marks of royal con- 
fidence shown him — the confederate of Castlereagh could only have obeyed 
his wishes. As the time had arrived for putting on a show of justice, the 
Marquis of Cornwallis, agent for England, ordered his secretary (Taylor) to 
write General Craig that he "entirely disapproves of the sentence of the 
above court-martial, acquitting Hugh Wollaghan of a cruel and deliberate 
gaurder, of which;, by the clearest evidence, he appears to have been guilty." 



44 the o'keillys. 

He also ordered Hugh to be dismissed from Armstrong's cavalry corps, and 
the court who had acquitted him to be dissolved. What private reward Hugh 
received could ben be ascertained by reference to the secret archives of Dub- 
lin castle. Poor Dogherty and his wife and their murdered boy were forgot- 
ten, but God sees all ; and the tears of Mary Dogherty, the blood of her in- 
nocent child, and her earnest prayers to the Omnipotent, are remembered in 
heaven ; the day of retribution is at hand, and when Emmet's epitaph is 
written in Ireland's freedom, so also will the humble Dogherty's. 

From informers like Armstrong — from a government who employed such 
wretches — Messrs. Emmet, MacNevin, O'Connor, Russell, and their colleagues 
sought an asylum in America. Royalty gave consent — Castlereagh nodded 
approbation — but Rufus King, in the name of the United States, forbade 
their emigration, and a Scottish fortress became their prison-house for other 
four weary years. 



THE O'REILLYS OF U L S T E R— G E NE R AL S ANDREW 
AND ALEXANDER, AND COL. EDMUND O'REILLY. 

The O'Reillys of Ulster are famous men in Irish story, and many of them, 
when proscribed or persecuted in their own country, have arrived at great 
and well-merited distinction in other parts of the world. The General Conde 
Alexander O'Reilly, who was commander of the formidable Spanish arma- 
ment against Algiers, was an Irishman — some of the most distinguished 
officers in the Irish brigade in France, both at the battle of Fontenoy and 
afterward, were O'Reillys — Hugh 0'B.eilly, an eminent catholic divine, presi- 
dent of the catholic college in Antwerp, and a near relative of Henry O'Reilly, 
the learned author of the History of Rochester and Western New York, was 
Irish born — and Francis I., Emperor of Germany, was so delighted with his 
Irish officers that he left the following memorandum among his papers at his 
death, in 1765: "The more Irish in the Austrian service, the better. Our 
troops will always be disciplined. An Irish coward is an uncommon charac- 
ter ; and what the natives of Ireland dislike even from principle, they gener- 
ally perform through a desire of glory." 

Andrew O'Reilly, Count O'Reilly, General of Cavalry in the Austrian army, 
may be considered as the last warrior of that distinguished class of Irish 
ufficers, the contemporaries or eleves of the Lacys, Dauns, Loudons, Bradys, 
and Browns, so renowned in the reigns of Maria Theresa and Joseph II. He 
was the second son of James O'Reilly of Ballincough, Westmeath, Ireland, 
and Barbara Nugent, grand-daughter of Thomas, the Fourth Earl of West- 
meath. By the brilliant charges of his dragoons, he saved the remnants of 
the Austrian Army at Austerlitz. In May, 1809, he was Governor of Vienna, 
and on him devolved the task of honorably capitulating with Napoleon, the 
victor of the age. Count O'Reilly died at the age of ninety-two, in Vienna, 
in 1832, holding the rank of General of Cavalry "in the Austrian Army, and 
Chamberlain Commander of the Imperial order of Maria Theresa. His sister 
is Lady Talbot of Malahide. No son or daughter inherits his honors. He 
died childless. 

Colonel Edmund Bui O'Reilly, Governor of Lanesborough, gave Ginckle no 
htlle trouble, during his efforts to pass the Shannon, previous to the battle of 
Aughrim. The Governor of Athlone, Major-General John Wauchope, a 
gallant Scotchman, warned Colonel O'Reilly that General Ginckle would 
endeavor to pass at the Lanesborough ford, and the latter threw up strong 
works on the Connaught side, so that the design had to be abandoned. The 
colonel was at that time the head of the ancient and powerful house of his 
name, which, like others of the Milesian or genuine nobility of Ulster, had 
been stripped of its large possessions in 1607 — he was a son of Col. Philip 
O'Reilly of Ballynacargy Castle, who commanded the troops of the Irish 
Catholics in Cavan in the time of Charles I. In King James's army, in 1690 
and '91, opposing English domination, were Colonel John O'Reilly, commander 



HENRY JOT M'CRACKEN. 45 

of a regiment of dragoons, Major and Captain Reilly, both killed at the battle 
of Cavan, and Lieu:. Cuftmel Luke Reilly. Hugh Reilly, of Lara, author of 
" Ireland's Case briefly shvfed" was made Cleric of the Privy Council in 16S9, 
and was King James's titular Lord Chancellor. Philip Oge O'Reilly was 

ier i f the Irish parliament, that year, for the town of Cavan, and Philip 
ih i Hi illy represented the County of Cavan. Colonel Edmund Bui, who 
had raised one regiment of foot and another of dragoons for King James, 
1 to France with the [fish army, after the surrender of Limerick, and 
his grandson, a captain in the regiment of Dillon, in the Irish brigade, was 
considered (says MacGeohegan) clnef of the clan. Walker, the historian of 
the Irish bards, in 1787, mentions Madam O'Reilly, countess of Cavan, as 
being the last of that noble but unfortunate house. Many flourishing offshoots 
(says O'Calhigiian in his Green Book) of the race of O'Reilly survive in Mealh 
and Cavan, and there are not a few in America. Bernard O'Reilly, the navi- 
gator — Bernard O'Reilly, the eminently pious and learned catholic clergyman 
of Rochester, N. V., anil several distinguished ornaments of the Irish catholic 
hierarchy, are descendants of this Milesian sept. 

The General Alexander Conde O'Reilly was born in Ireland, in the year 
1735, was educated in Spain, and entered the Spanish army at an early age. 
His career was brilliant and successful till the failure of the Algerine expe- 
dition. He was a catholic, but of what family of this great clan, I have not 
been able to ascertain. His death took place in Spain at a very advanced age. 

The armament fitted out by Spain against Algiers, toward the close of the 
last century, and placed under the command of General the Conde O'Reilly, 
was one of a most formidable character. There were six line-of-battle ships, 
twelve frigates, and thirty-three smaller vessels, with an army of 25,100 men. 
General Romana, who fell before Algiers at the head of his regiment, was 
jealous of O'Reilly, and thwarted him greatly in council and elsewhere. On 
the beach near Algiers, 80,000 Moorish troops were drawn up to oppose the 
invasion, but they made it good, advanced upon the city, got frightened, and 
retreated with great loss; the Moors gave no quarter id any Spaniard, and 
obtained an immense quantity of military stores. The commander is said by 
some to have displayed but litile military talent or knowledge of the country 
he attacked. He was at that time governor of Madrid, but became so unpop- 
ular through this failure, that he was sent as captain-general to Andalusia. 



HENRY JOY M'CRACKEN. 

This courageous youth was commander of the Irish army at the well-fought 
battle of Antrim, in 179S, and was cruelly put to death by the English author- 
ities. Previous to the strike for freedom he was a cotton manufacturer in ex- 
tensive business. 

The battle of Antrim was fought on the 6th of June, 1798. The Irish ad- 
vanced, with their long green banners, the bugles and fifes playing, and the 
United Irishmen singing the Marsellois hymn in chorus. After fighting long 
and bravely the people were defeated, and the gallant M"Cracken seized and 
hung by orders of the barbarous English government. " I saw him," said one 
of his noble companions, " as he marched to the field, his loose, flowing locks 
were confined by the helmet which shaded the arch of his manly brow, while 
his eye beamed with the fire which animated his soul, pure as the breeze from 
his native mountains, and generous as the floods which fertilize the valleys. 
The damps of the dungeon had rendered pallid his cheek and less robust his 
form, but the vigor of his mind was uninjured by the tyranny of our foreign 
taskmasters. I saw him in the blaze of his conquest— I saw him in the chill 
of defeat. I witnessed his splendor in arms, and the pride of his soul in dis- 
tress. Circumstances unavoidably separated us. A little time and he was 
the tenant of the tomb ! When, O when, shall the arbitrary sway of England 
cease, and Ireland rise, great, glorious, and free, her sons united, happy, and 
victorious ! Then will such a sacrifice not have been offered in vain." 

4 



46 CHIEF ..JJJgTiCE RUTLEDGE — MAJOR-GENERAL ANTHONY WAYNE. 

* CHIEF JUSTICE RUTLEDGE. 

John Rutledge, tire elder brother of Edward, and one of the signers of the 
Constitution of the United States, was educated in Europe, took an early and 
distinguished part in support of American freedom, was a member of the con- 
gress which met at New York, 1765, and of that which met in Philadelphia, 
1774, and was pronounced by the great Patrick Henry, the most accomplished 
orator in the last named learned and illustrious body. In March, 1776, he be- 
came president of South Carolina, was chosen governor, and took the field 
against the enemy in 1779. In 1787 Mr. Rutledge assisted in framing a con- 
stitution for the United States — in 1791 he was appointed Chief Justice of 
South Carolina, and afterwards became Chief Justice of the United States. 
He was born in 1739, in Carolina. This able statesman died January 23d, 
1800. O 3 Traducers of foreigners, peruse this volume, and learn what 
America owes to Irishmen and their sons and daughters ! 



* MAJOR-GENERAL ANTHONY WAYNE. 

This distinguished officer in the American army, was born at East-town, 
Pennsylvania, on the first of January, 1745. His father was a tanner and a 
farmer, a native of Ireland, in which his grandfather had commanded a 
squadron of dragoons, under William, Prince of Orange, at the battle of the 
Boyne. The family emigrated to Pennsylvania in 1722. The youthful and 
patriotic Wayne raised a regiment of volunteers in 1775, was unanimously 
elected their colonel, had a commission from congress in 1776, commanded a 
division of the army at the battle of Brandy wine, and displayed both courage 
and sound discretion. In 1775 he accompanied General Thompson into Can- 
ada, where he was soon led into action. In the defeat he behaved with great 
bravery, and saved a large body of the army, by the judicious manner in 
which he conducted their retreat after the general was made prisoner. In 
this battle Col. Wayne received a flesh wound in his leg. In the campaign 
of 1776, he served under General Gates at Ticonderoga, who esteemed him 
highly, not only for his courage and military talents, but for his knowledge as 
an engineer. It was said of him, that his eye was nearly equal to a measure 
in judging of heights and distances, a talent of incalculable consequence in 
an officer. At the close of this campaign he was created a brigadier-general. 
Throughout the war he was a most active, bold, and efficient officer, received 
a gold medal and the thanks of congress for his " brave, prudent, and soldierly 
conduct," took a conspicuous part in the campaign that ended in Cornwallis's 
capture, and was presented with a valuable farm at the close of the war, in 
consideration of his services. He succeeded General St. Clair in the com- 
mand of the army on the N. W. frontier, defeated the Indians, made a favor- 
able treaty, and, on the 15lh of December, 1796, died at the age of 51, in a 
hut at Presque Isle, and was buried on the shore of Lake Erie. 

While at the head of his men leading on the attack on Stony Point, in July, 
1779, he received a shot on his head, which it was supposed would prove 
mortal, and he asked to be carried into the works, that he might die on the 
spot he had so nobly redeemed, but he recovered. In 1787 he subscribed as a 
member of the Pennsylvania convention, the instrument which declared the 
present constitution of the United States to be part of the supreme law. 

In October, 1809, General Wayne's remains were removed to Eadnor 
Church, Chester County, Pennsylvania, by his son Isaac — the Cincinnati So- 
ciety having, on the 4th of July in that year, appropriated $500 to erect a 
monument to his memory there. 

The children of Irishmen, in 1776, felt the full force of a remark of Gov. 
Sullivan's, that " No price is too great to be paid for the maintenance of our 
Independence. No calamity can be so dreadful as subjection to a foreign 
power." Grattan, in his reply to an address of the Irish Volunteers, exclaim- 
ed — " Let no people ever consent to be a Province who have strength 
enough to be an independent nation." 



REV. EDWARD DROMGOOLE. 

REV. EDWARD DROMGOOLE. 



47 



This venerable preacher and revolutionary patriot — .the father of Creorge C. 
Dromgoole, a Member of the present Congress for Virginia — was a nau'ive of 
Ireland, and held the first Methodist Class-meeting in America. 

Edward Dromgoole was born in Sligo, in the province of Connaught. When 
a youth he came to America, a poor boy, with religious impressions and a 
strong desire for religious freedom. lie landed in Philadelphia in 1772 — came 
to Baltimore — and resided in that city or its vicinity with a Mr. John Haggerty, 
a tailor by trade, and a man of most exemplary piety. Edward Dromgoole 
had been brought up in Ireland to the trade of a linen-weaver. When he 
came to reside with Mr. Haggerty, that he might not eat the bread of idleness, 
he assisted him in the business of tailoring. The thimble with Avhich he 
worked, before the revolution, is still carefully preserved in the family. They 
worked together and prayed together ; and thus formed a social and religious 
attachment Which endured during their joint lives, and the survivor, Edward 
Dromgoole, to the day of his death, cherished with the fondest recollection 
the memory of his departed friend. They were disciples, or followers, as it 
was termed in those days, of John Wesley. 

In 1774 Edward Dromgoole commenced preaching. While residing with 
Mr. Haggerty, however, he formed a society, or class of Methodists, and held 
the first Methodist Class-meeting in America. 

From a sense of duty he entered upon the plan of itinerant labor in the 
ministry. He proceeded from Maryland to Virginia, and travelled extensively 
in the latter state and in North Carolina. His adopted America engrossed all 
his feelings of attachment to country. Without mingling in political discus- 
sions and controversy, he was, like John Bunyan and John Newton, the 
ardent, prayerful advocate of civil and religious freedom. 

In the very incipiency of the war between the Colonies and Great Britain, 
he hesitated not one moment in deciding whether he should owe allegiance to 
America or England, but quickly and voluntarily repaired to his friend and 
Christian brother Robert Jones, a magistrate in the county of Sussex, Vir- 
ginia, a man of great respectability and undoubted patriotism, before whom 
he took the oath of allegiance and fidelity, administered at his own request, 
and a certificate of which he constantly kept with him. 

Mr. Dromgoole travelled during the war of the revolution, everywhere, 
performing his ministerial functions. He was in the neighborhood of Halifax, 
North Carolina, when the news of the Declaiation of Independence was 
received, and after preaching to a large congregation, he read to them from 
his stand, at the request of Wilie Jones, Esquire, and other distinguished 
patriots of the town, that ever-memorable manifesto. 

He settled in Brunswick County, Virginia, where he resided until his death 
in 1835, in the 84th year of his age, having been a minister of the gospel for 
more than threescore years. 

He intermarried with Rebecca Walton in that county, whose ancestors had 
immigrated at an early period from England to Virginia, but whether they 
descended from the family of the bishop who compiled the polyglott bible, 
or from old Izaak the fisherman, is not clearly ascertained. They lived hap- 
pily together — raised and educated a family of children, of whom George C. 
Dromgoole, at present a member of Congress, is the youngest — and left them 
a competency, acquired neither by speculation nor extortion, but the result of 
economy and honest industry. Of such are the nobility of America. The 
class who prefer to weave, sew, and plough, rather than gamble or live in 
idleness, are the bone and sinew of free institutions. 

The weavers of Europe are among the earliest and most useful class of 
American immigrants — Columbus was a weaver and the son of a weaver ; but 
the "natives 1 ' in his days had established no human-tariff nor twenty-year- 
alien-bill to add to the difficulty, expense, and perils attendant on a settlement 
of the western world by their adventurous brethren from beyond the Atlantic 
wave ; and when royalty tried the experiment in part, prior to the revolution, 
it produced effects that had not been clearly anticipated. 



48 f. REVOLUTIONARY COLONELS. 

COLONEL'S MOYLAN, STEWART, PROCTOR, AND 
FITZGERALD. 

1 Aa ..[ indebted for most of the facts relative to these Hibernian heroes of 
tPfj revolution to a statement made by George Washington P. Custis, who is 
.inly very excellent authority. 

Colonel Moylan, a gallant man, says Mr. Custis, was an officer of cav- 
alry in the American war of 1776, often attached to the person of the gener- 
al (Washington), and always an especial favorite at head-quarters. Teeling, 
in his Narrative says : — 

•' Moylan, Carroll, and a thousand heroes may sleep in the silent tomb, but 
the remembrance of their virtues will be cherished while liberty is dear to 
the American heart." 

Colonel Walter Stewart, who commanded .the fourth Pennsylvania 
regimenl at the Rattle of Brandywine, and of whose opportune bravery and 
military skill, honorable mention is made by Mr. Custis, was a native of Ire- 
land. 

" It was Watty Stewart, says Cufetis, " who, at the battle of the Brandy- 
wine, commanded the 4th Pennsylvania regiment, composed of newly-raised 
troops. A shot from the British artillery struck down two files ; the young 
soldiers began to look alarmed, when Stewart — called in the army the Irish 
beauty — leaped from his charger, and, placing himself in the gap made by 
the shot, gaily cried to his men: 'Never mind, my boys, these fellows 
can not do that again.' " 

Rivers of Irish blood have flowed on behalf of American liberty — the no- 
blest and bravest spirits from tbe Emerald Isle have perilled life and freedom 
for the stars and stripes. Subtract from the defenders of the Union the Irish, 
and their gallant children, and who will undertake to show that the remain- 
der could have preserved the republic? When shall this debt of gratitude 
be paid ? When will America be able to publish a record like this volume, 
of manly sons of the Union, who have drawn the sword in defence of green 
Erin ? 

In Ramsay's History of the American War, he tells us that " two regiments 
of Connecticut troops mutinied, and got under arms." Who suppressed the 
revolt? The Pennsylvania Line. And who were they ? In vol. 2, p. 218, 
Ramsay tells us, " that the common soldiers were for the most part natives 
of Ireland, but though not bound to America by the accidental tie of birth, 
they were inferior to none in discipline, courage, or attachment to the cause 
of independence." 

The United Stales have no weighty claim of gratitude upon the Irish — no 
individual American has yet drawn his sword in defence of the rights of Irish- 
men. What soldiers were they who under General Wayne, in 171*1, stormed 
Stony Point, and compelled the R,oyalists to surrender at the point of the bay- 
onet ? The Irish Brigade. Who Avere they, under the same general, that 
terminated the Indian war on the plains of the Miami, in front of a royal 
garrison? Three-fourths of the troops were Irishmen. During the war of 
independence, where was the Irishman who shrunk from danger, left his col- 
ors, and became a tory ? There was not one. All of them proved true to a 
popular government which during threescore years has "never shed a drop 
of human blood, nor banished a single individual for political offences." 

Colonel Proctor, whom Mr. Custis describes as " a gallant and distin- 
guished officer of the artillery, who served during nearly the whole of the 
revolutionary war, attached to the army under the immediate command" of 
Washington, was an Irishman. 

Colonel Fitzgerald, says Mr. Custis, was an Irish officer in the old Blue 
and Buffs, the first volunteer company raised in the South in the dawn of the 
revolution, and commanded by Washington. In the campaign of 1776, and 
retreat through the Jerseys, Fitzgerald was appointed aid-de-camp to Wash- 
ington. At the battle of Princeton occurred that touching scene consecrated 
by history to everlasting remembrance. The American troops, worn down 



JOHN S.MILIE. 49 

by hardships exhausting marches', and want of food, on the fall of their 
leader, that bravo old Scotchman, (uncial Mercer, recoiled before the bayo- 
nets of the veteran foe. Washington spurred his horse into the interval be- 
tween the hostile lines, reining up with the charger's head to the foe, and 

calling to his soldiers, " Will you give up your general to the enemy ?" .'he 
appeal was not made in vain; the Americans faced about, and the arms were 
levelled on both sides — Washington between them, even as though he had 
placed there as a target for 66th. it was at this moment that Fitzger- 
ald returned from carrying an order to the rear; and here let mc use the gal- 
lant veteran's own words. He said : " On my return I perceived the general 
immediately between our line and that of the enemy, both lines levelling for 
the decisive fire that was to decide the fortune of the day. Instantly there 
was a roar of musketry, followed by a shout. It was the shout of victory. 
On raising my eyes 1 discovered the enemy broken and flying, while dimly 
amid the glimpses of the smoke was seen Washington, alive and unharmed, 
waving his hat, and cheering his comrades to the pursuit. I dashed my 
rowels into my charger's flanks, and flew to his side, exclaiming, ' Thank God ! 
your excellency is safe.' I wept like a child, for joy." 



JOHN SMILIE. 

The venerable Chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations, in the 
House of Representatives in Congress, after John C. Calhoun, during the first 
year of the war, was a true-hearted Irishman, a native of Newton-Ards in the 
County of Down, and who fought with great zeal and courage during the war 
of independence, for all that is good in the institutions under which we live. 
In 1792, Congress laid a tax on distilled spirits and on stills, which Pennsyl- 
vania petitioned against. At a meeting in Pittsburg, on the 21st of August, 
that year, at which Colonel Canon presided, and the celebrated Albert Gal- 
latin acted as clerk, John Smilie being present, they denounced the introduc- 
tion of the British and Irish excise-laws and officers into America, " convinced 
that a tax upon liquors, which are the common drink of a nation, operates 
in proportion to the numbers and not to the wealth of the people." 

Remonstrance was unavailing, the Pennsylvanians resorted to resistance, 
an army was raised, the rebels were quelled, and the tax was abandoned. 
Messrs. Gallatin and Smilie went no farther than remonstrance, but so bitter 
were the federal party toward the former, that when, soon after this he was 
elected a senator of the United States for Pennsylvania, and had sat sometime 
in that august body, the party supposed to be the most friendly to European 
aristocratic institutions, and opposed to adopted citizens, discovered that he 
(Gallatin) had been born in Switzerland, and had not lived quite twenty-two 
years in Pennsylvania, and being the majority they expelled or removed him. 
But the people of Pennsylvania sent him back to Congress at the very next 
election, when he was found to be beyond the power of the Alien Law of that 
day. Mr. Smilie was chairman of the committee in Congress who reduced 
the fourteen years Alien Law of John Adams to a naturalization after five 
years' residence, in 1802 ; but I find by " the United Slates Gazette''' of Novem- 
ber, 1812, that the American tories kept an evil eye upon him ever after. 

" By the congressional report of Monday last," says the Gazette, " it ap- 
pears that old Mr. Smilie is appointed Chairman of the Committee of Foreign 
Relations. This is as it ought to be. At this crisis of our affairs it would 
be peculiarly unfit to have selected a native citizen to preside over our foreign 
relations."* 

Next month the venerable patriot breathed his last, on the 30th of Decem- 
ber. I copy the following obituary notice, from the Washington National 
Intelligencer of the 31st of December, 1812 : — 

" Died, in this city, at two o'clock yesterday afternoon, the venerable John 
Smilie, a representative in Congress from Pennsylvania, aged about 74 years. 
* Mr. Smilie had been resident in America more than fifty years. 



/ 



i 



50 / WILLIAM COLEMAN. 



He was a nan ve of Ireland, but arriving in this country at an early age, was 
engaged in tfae war of the revolution both in civil and military capacities. 
Since that ]> vriod he has never been out of public service, in conventions, in 
the -Legislature of Pennsylvania, and of the United States, in which several 
can- Afities he has distinguished himself as the firm and undeviating supporter 
m republican government, and of his country's rights. At the commence- 
ment of the present session, the estimation in which he was held was evin- 
ced by his appointment to the important station of Chairman of the Committee 
of Foreign Relations. He has descended to the tomb of his fathers, crowned 
with years and honor, carrying with him the profound regrets of his intimate 
acquaintances, and the respect of all mankind." 



♦WILLIAM COLEMAN. 

This veteran federal journalist was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on the 
14th of February, 1766, and died of apoplexy at his house in Hudson street, 
New York, on the morning of Monday, July 13th, 1829, in the 64th year of 
his age. He stated in the Post, in 1815, that his father was a native of Dub- 
lin, in Ireland, but he was a steady opponent of the United Irishmen, and 
never once breathed an audible wish, through his press, for freedom from a 
foreign yoke to the land of his forefathers. He was educated for the bar under 
the celebrated Mr. Pearson of Andover, and acquired the reputation of an 
acute, able, and successful lawyer, in Greenfield, on the Connecticut river, 
which chose him as its representative in the Massachusetts legislature. When 
the famous Massachusetts insurrection, headed by Daniel Sheys, broke out, 
William Coleman was one of those who took up' arms to disperse the insur- 
gents. 

The following particulars I take from the N. Y. Evening Post of the 14th 
of July, 1829. 

" In the year 1794, Mr. Coleman married the lady who is now his widow, 
and came to this city where he entered upon the practice of law, first as a 
partner of Col. Burr, a connexion which lasted but a short time, and afterward 
of Francis Arden, Esq. During the ascendancy of the federal party in this 
state, he was appointed reporter of the Supreme Court, a situation from which 
he was removed in 1800, when the federal party became a minority. 

"About this time several distinguished federalists in this city, among whom 
were General Hamilton, Col. Troup, Col. Richard Varick, Archibald Gracie, 
Samuel Boyd, and William W. Woolsey, formed the plan of procuring a daily 
paper to be established here, which should be the organ of their party. Mr. 
Coleman, who was recommended by the boldness of his character, the vigor 
and clearness of his style, and his acuteness in controversy, was applied to, 
and requested to become its editor. He undertook the charge of the new pa- 
per, and the first number of the Evening Post was issued on the 16th of No- 
vember, 1801. 

" Throughout his long editorial career Mr. Coleman sustained the reputa- 
tion of one of the most able and active conductors of the public press in the 
United States. At the very outset he enjoyed the intimacy and confidence of 
some of the most illustrious men of whom our history has to boast : and the 
columns of his paper were graced by the writings of those who conducted us 
safe through the stormy period of the revolution, whose wisdom framed the 
institutions which are our pride, and whose powers of persuasion recommend- 
ed them to the adoption of the American people. In the long and bitter con- 
test waged between the federal and democratic parties, the Evening Post, un- 
der his direction, took a leading and fearless part, and the opinions of which 
it was the vehicle were received with deference all over the Union by the 
party to which it was attached. To that party he adhered with the closest 
fidelity until its extinction, and even then he continued to avow its name and 
to defend it's memory." 



WILLIAM COLEMAN- 51 

He was so strongly opposed to the war of 1812, that he stood in great per- 
sonal danger. Ja 1819, when he and Governor (Minion were no longer friend- 
ly, he made the following remarks in the Post:— "I understand that Mr. Clin- 
ton complains of my editorial course towards him as an act of ingratitude, for 
that at a time of great excitement in people's minds, during the last war, it 
was he who interposed to prevent my house being lorn down, and perhaps 
my life itself from being sacrificed. It is true, that at the time alluded to, 
when he was mayor, by the appointment of the federal party, and when 1 had 
the honor to think with him, upon the subject of the war and the general ad- 
ministration, I once mentioned to him, as the Chief Magistrate of the cit\. 
that 1 bad, among the anonymous threats that I was in the habit of receiving 
dailv, one in my possession of such a nature, as led me to believe that some- 
thing lilce a riot was likely to take place that night, if not prevented by the 
police," &c. 

When Bonaparte returned to France from Elba, Mr. Coleman showed more 
bitterness toward him than even the despots of Europe — he was angry at 
them because they had not shot or guillotined him in 1813. 

" With emotions of astonishment, (says Mr. Coleman), we see that Napo- 
leon Bonaparte, has again possessed himself of the throne of France, forcing 
the late King to quit his kingdom and his country. We shall see the light 
and fickle French people who but yesterday hailed with enthusiastic delight 
the exaltation of the race of Bourbon, to-day rending the air with acclamations 
of joy, that the Corsican whom they denominated a bloody tyrant, a demon in 
human shape, had returned to bless them. The first idea that occurs is how 
mistaken was the clemency of Louis in permitting a man to live, who had a 
thousand times forfeited his life to the laws, and whose existence could not but 
hourly endanger the peace of the world !" 

He goes on to denounce Napoleon as a "blood-stained villain," a "stain on 
the human species," " a blot on the earth," " a wretch, a monster," &o. — praises 
the Bourbons — sneers at American victories — and indeed during the whole of 
the contest, from 1812 till the battle of New Orleans, proved himself an ef- 
ficient friend of England, harassed and annoyed his own country, traduced 
Duane, Gales, Madison, Jefferson, and all who stood up for America, and 
lauded the Bourbons to the skies. 

Just before he established the Evening Post, Messrs. Clinton, Spencer, and 
the republicans, removed him from the office of Clerk of the Circuit in New 
York state, and put J. M'Kesson in his place— he then issued his journal under 
General Hamilton's patronage, as his organ in New York. 

The writer of these sketches has read with attention much of the Evening 
Post, from 1802 till 1819, when Mr. C. became a less active contributor to its 
columns, and acknowledges that it displayed great ability, independence, 
originality, and industry — that it fearlessly exposed many abuses — effectually 
checked in numerous instances the party in power when wrong or corrupt — 
and was the work of a bold, fearless, and, I think, honest even where mistaken 
man, with a vigorous understanding, though somewhat violent in temper. 

It is unjust to censure any man for the sincere expression of his honest opin- 
ions in favor of or against any particular form of government, whether it be 
monarchy or democracy. Pope denounced the selfishness of his age, so did 
the poets and historians of Greece and Rome, so did the federal editor William 
Coleman, so did Thomas Moore. When we take into consideration that a 
large portion of the leaders and supporters of the so-called democratic party 
of his day were openly venal and corrupt, and in power, and that Mr. Coleman 
told, for the public advantage, and to his own injury, many unpleasant truths 
concerning them, and checked hypocrites where they crossed his path, we 
ought to feel grateful for the good he did. Cobbett denounced the abuses of de- 
mocracy here — returned to England and battled for a quarter of a century against 
the still greater crimes of an aristocratic system there — was impoverished — 
kept years in a jail — banished — slandered — harassed. Moore, a sincere friend 
of liberty, but the very antipodes of a democrat, lashed the vices and follies of 
his own country ; clothed in immortal verse the meanness and criminal policy 



52 SIR EDWARD WILLIAM CROSEIE. 

of* George the Fourth, Castlereagh, Sidmouth, Eldon„and their vile colleagues : 
and alter a residence in America, praised the federalists of that day for their 
sincerity, and doubted the permanence of our republican system, because of 
the unskilfulness or vices of the majority of the people, and the avarice, hy- 
pocrisy, mean sycophancy, and open dishonesty of many in whom they trusted. 
In all Coleman's massy folios, where can Ave find anything stronger than the 
following extract from the sixth epistle, addressed by Moore to Viscount 
Forbes, (a liberal,) from the city of Washington, more than forty years since? 
It is less important that we should ask ourselves whether it Avas a truth or a 
iibel, or both, then, than that we should examine whether it is fact or carica- 
ture now ; and if found to have yet some foundation, that there should be an 
effort made to provide a remedy. Boz is eulogistic when compared with Cole- 
man and Moore, and even Matthew Carey, when dying, declared our moral 
condition hopeless. Can Moore's picture find a reality in Wall street or at 
Washington? Here it is: 

Long has the lust of gold, that meanest rage, 
And latest foil}' of man's sinking age, 
Which, rarely venturing in the van of life, 
While nobler passions wage their heated strife, 
Comes skulking last, with selfishness and fear, 
And dies, collecting lumber in the rear; 
Long has it palsied every grasping hand 
And greedy spirit in this bartering land; 
Turned life to traffic, set the demon gold 
So loose abroad, that virtue's self is sold, 
And conscience, truth, and honesty, are made 
To rise and fall, like other wares of trade ! 

Mr. Coleman was succeeded by William Cullen Bryant, the present distin- 
guished editor, and bv the late William Lees^ett. 



SIR EDWARD WILLIAM CROSBIE, BARONET. 

This Irish protestant gentleman, was tried by a pretended court-martial at 
View Mount near Carlow, during the revolt in 1798, and hanged because 200 
of the rebels had exercised in the lawn near his house a few days before, 
which he could not prevent. Such was British government in Ireland. Af- 
ter his death the royal officers so insulted his lady that she had to fly to Eng- 
land. In 1800 she applied for a copy of the evidence before the court of dra- 
goons who tried her husband, and it was refused. The witnesses to prove 
Sir Edward's entire innocence, when called, were, by an understanding among 
the government agents, prevented from going into court and testifying — the 
sentinel put his bayonet to their breasts, though they were loyal protestants, 
and he was well-informed of their errand. Sir Edward's heart had spurned 
at the hauteur and cruelty of the rich and powerful towards his poor coun- 
trymen — he had complained that England governed Ireland more like a mis- 
erable colony than as a federal state. He suffered like a brave and injured 
man, but no redress was ever given. Sir Edward's brother, well known as 
" Balloon Crosbie," was the first aeronaut Avho constructed an Hibernian bal- 
loon, and took a journey into the sky in Ireland. He Avas a most ingenious 
mechanic, of immense stature (6 feet 3 inches), tAVo inches taller than Daniel 
O'Connell, very like him in face and figure, and as brave as a lion. Of the 
crowds Avho rushed to see him set off from Dublin to England in his balloon, 
several were killed — and Crosbie himself dropped into the sea between Dub- 
lin and Holyhead, but Avas taken out alive. 

The Reverend James Gordon, a rector of the law-established church of Ire- 
land, states in his history that Sir Edward Crosbie was highly accomplished, 
loyal, humane, and benevolent — friendly to parliamentary reform, likely to 
afford some check to cruel, rapacious landlords — and adds, that "catholic pris- 



THE DUKE OF WELLINGTON. 53 

been tortured by repeated floggings to force them to give evidence 
against aim, and appear to have heen promised their lives upon no other con- 
dition than that of his condemnation." No offence was proved, and Mr. Gor- 
don mentions this as the reason why the members of the court-martial, in 
defiance of law, withheld the register, and kept it a secret from his wife and 
family — as also, that " the execution of the sentence was precipitate, at an 
unusual hour, and attended with atrocious circumstances, not warranted by 
the sentence. After he was hanged, his body was abused, his head severed 
from it, and exposed on a pike." 

The president of the court was an illiterate man — but what numbers have 
fallen victims to ignorance in power, whose wrongs have been unnoticed! 
O, that America would take warning by the lessons of British avarice and 
brutal cruelty, with lust of power ! All the inquisitions that ever were — 
Spanish, Portuguese, and Venitian — may be called types of humanity itself 
when compared to the English government of Ireland, India, and Canada. 



THE DUKE OF WELLINGTON. 

Arthur Welleslev was born at Dangan Castle, in the County of Meath, 
Ireland, May 1st, 1769, the fourth son of the Earl of Mornington, a poor Irish 
Peer, educated at Eton, then sent to France to the military school at Angers. 
He entered the army as an ensign in the 41st regiment, but soon became 
lieutenant-colonel of the 30th, over the heads of many old officers, through 
purchase and family interest — went on the recruiting service in Ireland — 
fought and slaughtered by wholesale, in India, — became Secretary for Ireland, 
and a member of Parliament — joined the army in Portugal — was raised to the 
chief command — fought the battles of Talavera, Vittoria, Fuentes d'Onor, 
and Toulouse — was created a Duke, and two millions of dollars were voted 
to him by Parliament — went to France as ambassador — gained the battle of 
Waterloo with superior numbers, and by the opportune arrival and assistance 
of Bulow and Blucher — advanced to Paris — urged the necessity of sending 
Napeolon to the distant rock of St. Helena, contrary to law and every hon- 
orable and manly principle— commanded the foreign armies who garrisoned 
France — had another million of dollars voted to him from the pockets of the 
hard-worked people of Britain — became commander-in-chief of the armies 
of Britain — then Prime Minister of England, when he yielded Catholic eman- 
cipation because it was found that the army could not be depended upon to 
hinder it. In 1830 he gave way to the Whigs, and now again holds office 
with Peel. 

The duke is a slight, feeble-built man, in his 75th year — temperate in his 
habits, rather penurious, possessed of much good sense, a skilful military cap- 
tain, but said to be excessively shy of powder and shot. For Canada he 
recommended a strong government, patronage [corruption], and the absence 
of all real popular influence. Paper money he detests, and the tedious jargon 
of the lawyers is his abomination. A host of his poor relatives have pen- 
sions, and his titles of honor would fill one of these pages. 

But for Castlereagh's management Wellington would never have obtained 
the chief command in Spain— and but for Wellington's success, Castlereagh 
never could have stood his ground, as Minister of State. Wellington entered 
the Irish Parliament in 1790, for Trim, as Captain Welleslev. As Sir Arthur 
he was sent to Copenhagen in 1807, second in command to Lord Cathcart, to 
execute, by order of Castlereagh and Co., the basest piece of treachery and 
ingratitude on the records of history. If there should be ten amnesties in 
Canada, let no man worth hanging trust to the murderers and robbers of their 
own allies in Denmark. And let it not be forgotten that Paris was delivered 
up to Wellington, after Waterloo, on the plain basis of a general amnesty — 
on that ground alone did Ney support it. Wellington took no rest till Ney 
was a corpse ! ! ! 



54 CAPTAIN AMBROSE SPENCER — N. H. PATRIOTS. 

These biographical sketches would have been a very imperfect accompa- 
niment to history, had they failed to include the names of remarkable Irish- 
men who for the sake of gain chose to make common cause with their coun- 
try's oppressors. No nation is free from the unprincipled — heaven itself, as 
portrayed by Milton, and Paradise while the parents of our race abode in its 
bowers, were not free from evil. But where on earth will the lover of en- 
lightened freedom find a greater proportion, than in Ireland and Irish story, 
of those glorious spirits who will live forever in the public eye — their noble 
deeds shining forth long after their ashes are scattered to the winds of heaven 
— encouraging our youth to love justice — kindling high conceptions — strength- 
ening manly virtues, and high resolves ? 

We find insincere politicians in Ireland and Canada patronising Orange- 
Lodges, and in the United States encouraging Native American Associations, 
to divide the people into hostile classes, and thus endeavoring to effect, by 
guile, an object which baffled George the Third and all the tories of 1776, 
when wielding the whole credit and resources of the British empire. 



** CAPT. AMBROSE SPENCER. 

Ambrose Spencer, a captain in the United Slates army last war, was a son 
of Chief Justice Spencer. His mother was the oldest sister of De Witt Clin- 
ton, and he was brother to John C. Spencer, Secretary of the Treasury, and 
aid-de-camp to Major-General Brown, the Commander-in-Chief on the Niagara 
frontier, last war. Mr. Spencer was killed lighting bravely for his country at 
the battle of Lundy's Lane or Niagara Falls. The following letter, ad- 
dressed to James Monroe, Secretary at War, by General Brown, shows that 
Capt. Spencer's last moments were spent in the British camp, a prisoner. 

"Head Quarters, Fort Erie, Sept. 20, 1814. 

" Sir — Among the officers lost to this army in the battle of Niagara Falls, 
was my aid-de-camp, Capt. Ambrose Spencer, who, being mortally wounded, 
was left in the hands of the enemy. By flags from the British army, I was 
shortly afterward assured of his convalescence, and an offer was made me by 
Lt. Gen. Drummond to exchange him for his own aid, Capt. Loring, then a 
prisoner of war with us. However singular this proposition appeared, as 
Capt. Loring was not wounded, nor had received the slightest injury, I was 
willing to comply with it on Capt. Spencer's account; but as I knew his 
wounds were severe, I first sent to ascertain the fact of his being then living. 
My messenger, with a flag was detained, nor even once permitted to see Capt. 
S. though in his immediate vicinity. The evidence I wished to acquire failed, 
but my regard for Capt. Spencer would not permit me longer to delay, and I 
informed General Drummond that his aid should be exchanged even for the 
body of mine. This offer was, no doubt, gladly accepted, and the corpse of 
Capt. S. sent to the American. 

" Indignant, as I am, at this ungenerous procedure, I hold myself bound in 
honor to Lieut. Gen. Drummond, to return Capt. Loring ; and must, therefore, 
earnestly solicit of you his immediate relief release. He can return to Gen. 
Drummond by the way of Montreal. JAC. BROWN." 

" Mr. Secretary Spencer, of the Treasury, is said to have been a very efficient 
aid-de-camp to General M'Clure, last war, on the Niagara frontier. His pub- 
lic life is given in another part of this volume. 



NEW HAMPSHIRE PATRIOTS — ERA OF 1776. 

* Major M'Clary — * Capt. M'Gregor — * Brigadter-General Reid — * Col. 
Gregg — * Major-General Stark — * Lieut. Orr — * * Major Stark, &c. 

I am chiefly indebted to the collections of the New Hampshire Historical So- 
ciety, Swett's Bunker Hill, Belknap's and Whiton's Histories, the New Hamp- 



MAJOR M'cLARY — CAFT. M'GREGOR — GENERAL EEID. 55 

shire Gazetteer, and Hill and Moore's collections, for the following notices of 
eminent citizens, of Irish birth, parentage or descent, who took arms for in- 
dependence in 1776. 

Major Am»ki;\v M'Clary, who shed his blood, like Warren, on Bunker 
Hill, was an active and efficient revolutionary officer. He commanded the 
Londonderry company at the battle of Bunker Hill, where he was killed, as is 
stated in a letter from General Stark to President Thornton, by a cannon-ball. 
General Folsom writes, June 22d, 1775, " Major M'Clary was killed by an ac- 
cidental shot from one of the ships, sometime after our people had made their 
retreat." He was of Epsom, N. II., and his parents were from the North of 
Ireland. John M'Clary, also of Epsom, is mentioned by Whiton as having 
been a distinguished patriot of the revolution — and in the Historical Collections, 
Michael M'Clary is named as the captain of company five, third battalion, 
state militia, in 1776. These M'Clarys were of the right sort of stuff where- 
with to found a republic. May the race endure forever ! 

Swett, in his History of the Battle of Bunker Hill, (page 6,) says that Major 
M'Clary " was a favorite officer. Nearly six feet and a half in height, with 
a Herculean form in perfect proportions, a voice like Stentor, and strength of 
Ajax ; ever unequalled in athletic exercises, and unsubdued in single combat, 
whole bodies of men had been overcome by him, and he seemed totally un- 
conscious that he was not equally unconquerable at the cannon's mouth. His 
mind and character were of the same energetic cast with his person ; and 
though deficient in the advantages of finished education, he had been a mem- 
ber of the state legislature, and his mercantile concerns were extensive." 

Of M'Clary's conduct in the heat of battle, Swett adds, (page 35)— "During 
this tremendous fire of musketry and roar of cannon, M'Clary's gigantic voice 
was heard, animating and encouraging the men as though he would inspire 
every ball that sped, with his own fire and energy." 

After the retreat, says Swett, (page 48,) " M'Clary, as attentive to the wants 
of his men as desperate in fighting them, galloped to Medford, and returned 
with dressings for the wounded. He ordered Capt. Dearborn to advance 
toward the neck, with his company, while he crossed over to reconnoitre the 
enemy. He was returning when a cannon-ball from the Glasgow tore him to 
pieces. No smaller weapon seemed worthy to destroy the gigantic hero." 

General Henry Dearborn, who was a lieutenant at Bunker Hill, published a 
letter in the New Hampshire Patriot, in which he says, " Gen. M. M'Clary, 
Epsom, was in the battle from beginning to end." Michael M'Clary was 
then a captain. 

David M'Gregor, a revolutionary soldier, commanded the sixth company 
of the battalion in which Michael M'Clary served. He was the son of the 
presbyterian minister of Londonderry — of Irish parentage and Scottish origin 
— his ancestors having probably fled to Ireland after the massacre of Glencoe. 
His lather, the Rev. David M'Gregor, says Whiton, page 151, " a presbyterian 
minister of Londonderry, long eminent for piety, eloquence, and usefulness, 
died in the course of the revolutionary Avar, after having exerted an important 
influence in preparing the minds of the people to engage in that perilous con- 
test." Capt. M'Gregor died in Western New York, in 1827. 

Brigadier-General George Reid was born at Londonderry, New Hamp- 
shire, in 1734. His parents were Irish emigrants from the province of Ulster ; 
part of the Scotch colony of presbyterians who settled in Ireland during the 
reign of Charles II. to avoid religious persecution. He received an excellent 
education, was a very brave, fearless man, and went for national independence 
with all his heart. 

General Reid was a grand-uncle of one of the most eminent, able, and use- 
ful among our public journalists, Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune, 
who is partly of northern or Scotch-Irish descent. 

At the battle of Bunker Hill, John Stark commanded the first New Hamp- 
shire regiment, (afterward commanded by Col. Cilley,) and George Reid serv- 
ed as his lieutenant-colonel. He was also at the hard-fou<rht field of Benning- 
ton, and served during the war with credit and honor. When the three N. H. 



56 COLONEL GREGG — GENERAL STARK. 

battalions were reduced to two, he took command of one of them — was with 
his regiment at West Point in 1780, and afterward in New Jersey. His bro- 
ther, Abraham Reid, was Stark's first-lieutenant at Bunker Hill. 

On the 10th of August, 17S5, Col. Reid was appointed a brigadier-general 
of militia, and in October, 1791, chosen sheriff of the county of Rockingham. 
ile was a pleasant companion, full of anecdote and adventure, and lived to see 
four score and one years. His death took place in October, 1815. 

[Col. James Reid or Reed, of Londonderry according to Whiton, comman- 
ded the second New Hampshire battalion at Bunker Hill. He took the small 
pox at Ticonderoga in 1776, and afterward lost his sight. It is probable that 
he was of the same lineage as George.] 

Colonel William Gregg was born in Londonderry, New Hampshire, on 
the 'Jin of October, 1730. His father, John Gregg, emigrated from the north 
of Ireland, with his grandfather — they were of the first sixteen settlers in 
Londonderry in 1718— Presbyterians — frugal, intelligent, hard-working far- 
mers. 

Colonel Gregg commanded a company of minute men at the commence- 
ment of the war — marched from Londonderry to the relief of Boston, with 
his company, early in 1775 — returned late that year to attend to the duties of 
a member of the committee of public safety — was appointed Major of the 
1st N. H. Militia in 1776, and commanded the vanguard at the battle of Ben- 
nington, under Stark, by his conduct in which he got great credit. His ex- 
ertions during the war were such as a faithful and experienced republican might 
be expected to render to a country he loved. He had his reward, for he lived 
in health and wealth — hospitable, cheerful, and social — to the great age of 
ninety-three years; and died at his birth-place, on the 16th of September, 
1824, after Lafayette had returned to enjoy a peaceful triumph in America, 
nearly half a century beyond the time of his first visit. 

Major-General Stark, the hero of Bennington, was the son of a Scots- 
man, but he had an Irish mother, and must therefore be noticed here. His 
father was a native of Dumbarton, in Scotland, and educated at the University 
of Edinburgh. He went over to Ireland, married a native of the province of 
Ulster, and settled in Londonderry, New Hampshire, where John Stark was 
born, on the 17th of August, 1728, O. S., corresponding with the 28th of our 
reckoning — or, according to the Boston Post, of December, 1843, on the 8th 
of July. 

"He is to be ranked" says Samuel L. Knapp, "among that hardy and val- 
uable race that may be called the founders of the American republic. He 
was a yeoman, the son of a yeoman, one of those emigrants who had lately 
come from Ireland, and brought with them industrious habits, with the linen 
spinning-wheel, and the potato." Young Stark learned the art of war in his 
youth, while France and England were struggling for the control of Canada. 
He was with Lord Amherst at the reduction of Ticonderoga. 

The very hour in which the news of the battle of Lexington reached Stark, 
then at work in his saw-mill on the falls near the site where the manufactu- 
ring city of Amoskeag is now building up — he shut down the gates of his mill, 
shouldered his musket, took three dollars in silver, all he had in his house, 
and started off. By the time he reached Cambridge, his little army of volun- 
teers had increased to a thousand. He immediately received a colonel's com- 
mission from the Massachusetts Committee of Safety, and in less than two 
hours enlisted eight hundred men. He led a gallant band to Bunker Hill, 
where his conduct was brave and fearless. He commanded the right wing 
of the advance-guard, and Greene the left, at the battle of Trenton, on the 
morning when the Hessians were surprised. Colonel Baum was detached 
from Burgoyne's army to destroy the New Hampshire forces, and get cattle, 
horses, and forage. Stark met, "fought, and on the 16th of August, 1777, de- 
feated the royalists ; Baum was mortally wounded, his forces were taken pris- 
oners ; General Gates was cheered by this success, Burgoyne disheartened. 
All parties admit that the battle of Bennington was as decisive a victory as 



GENERAL STARK — LIEUTENANT ORR. 57 

any gained during the war, and that it led to most important results. Stark 
was one of the most active officers in the American army, received very im- 
portant commissions from Washington, and always did his duty with alacrity, 
Cor hi heart was in the cause. At the peace he retired to his farm with the 
pr< ud consciousness of having materially aided in creating a home for the 
oppressed in the land of his lathers. He never despaired of the republic, but 
died a modern Cincinnatus, a farmer, on the 8th of May, 1822, in his 
94th year, hoping and believing that honest men would win the race, and the 
flag of the Union wave for ages over the happiest, because the most virtuous 
portion of the human family. 

Paulding thus notices the Battle of Bennington, in bis Life of Washington : — 

"On the memorable heights of Bennington, the Hessians were once more 
made to feel the courage and humanity of those who, while defending their 
owa lives, respected the lives of their most obnoxious enemies. 

"Here Breymen and Baum, two experienced officers, were met by Stark, 
and warm was the greeting he gave them. Colonel Baum fortified himself in 
a favorable position and waited for his associate, Breyman. Before he had 
tim • to arrive, the Green Mountain Boys rushed upon his intrenchments with 
such irresistible impetuosity that nothing could withstand them. The val- 
leys rung with the roaring of cannon, answered by a thousand echoes of the 
mountains, mingled with shouts and dying groans. On the first assault the 
Canadians took to their heels ; Baum received a mortal wound, and not a man 
of all his companions escaped — all were either killed or taken, and 600 Ger- 
mans totally annihilated. \ 

" Ignorant of the fate of his old comrade Colonel Breymen came up a few 
hours afterward, where he met his victorious enemies instead of conquering 
friends His troops were nearly all taken. 

" This was another crisis in the great cause of liberty," says Paulding ; and 
those who are now the bitter enemies of Irishmen in America, may keep in 
memory that the general commanding was the son of an Irish mother. 

During the last four years of his life, Congress allowed General Stark a 
pension of 60 dollars a month. 

Swett, in bis History of the Battle of Bunker Hill (page 6), states that Col. 
Stark '• had been a distinguished captain of the Provincial B,angers, received 
into the service of the crown, was at Quebec under General Wolfe, and en- 
joyed half-pay as a British officer." He threw up this income, in 1775 ; and, 
though oftentimes urged, Congress steadily refused to vote him an allowance 
until 1818, forty-five years after, when they awarded him a monthly pension ! 
The noble St. Clair bad also to struggle with poverty until ninety days before 
he died, when a pension was awarded ! 

Swett also informs us, that after the Battle of Bunker Hill, Congress pro- 
moted Colonel Poor, a brigadier-general, over the courageous Stark, who 
complained of it to them by letter, but as they took no notice of his memori- 
al, be left the service, joined the N. H. militia as brigadier-general, marched 
with his troops to protect the frontiers independently of the national army, and 
gained bis famous victories, while Congress were voting that the instructions 
he had received were destructive of military subordination! On hearing of 
bis opportune success they asked why he did not inform them of it. He re- 
plied that they had not, yet attended to his last letters, on which they appoint- 
ed him a brigadier-general, and thanked him and his gallant troops. 

John Orh was in the battle of Bennington, a lieutenant under General 
Stark, and received a wound in the thigh. The ball entered just above the 
knee joint, lodged in the bone, which was much fractured, aud Lieutenant 
Orr became a cripple for life. 

He was many years a member of the general court, and was seven times 
successively elected a senator, was many years a magistrate of New Hamp- 
shire, and held other offices. 

He died at Bedford in January, 1823, aged 75, and was deeply lamented. 
He was a man of sound judgment, good memory, and excellent character. 



58 THE PATTENS — GOFFE — Bl'cLINTOCK — STARK — BANIM — BOTSE. 

His parents were from the north of Ireland, probably of the same Orrs who 
were executed in 1797-'8, for love of country. 

With him at Bennington, say the N. H. Society's Collections, were Jacob 
McQuade, Samuel McA'ffee (who died), John Wallace, James McLaughlin, 
&c. 

The Pattens. — Judge Matthew Patten and Captain Samuel Patten, were 
two of the first settlers in Bedford. They were from Ulster, in Ireland — and 
in the N. H. Collections, Lieutenant John Patten, John Patten, jr., Samuel 
Patten, James Patten, and Robert Patten, are enumerated among the noble 
band of " revolutionary patriots who served their country in the glorious 
struggle for independence." 

Major John Goffe is another of the patriots of Irish descent, enumerated 
in the New Hampshire Collections, who served honorably through the war of 
independence. 

The Rev. Dr. Samuel MacClintock, of Greenland, the chaplain to Stark's 
New Hampshire regiment, was in the battle of Bunker Hill, intrepidly by 
•'his exhortations, prayers, and example, encouraging and animating them to 
the unequal conflict." He was of the race of Scottish covenanters, who had 
settled in Ireland in the seventeenth century, to avoid persecution, and had 
been chaplain to Goffe 's regiment in the war of 1756. 

Major Caleb Stark, eldest son of General John Stark, served under his 
father's command in the war of independence— entered the army at the age 
of sixteen, as quarter-master of the 1st New Hampshire Regiment, of which 
he was afterwards adjutant and next brigade-major, and aid-de-camp to his 
father. He fought at Bunker Hill and Trenton, and at the battles in Septem- 
ber and October, 1777, which preceded Burgoyne's surrender. He was born 
December 3, 1759 ; died August 26, 1838, and was buried in the family place 
of interment, Dumbarton, N. H. 

Among the Irishmen and children of Irishmen, mentioned in the New 
Hampshire records as having bravely struggled for American freedom in the 
war of independence, at the risk of life and property, I find the names of 
Captain Thomas M'Laughlin — Patrick O'Fling — Patrick O'Murphy — John 
O'Neill — Valentine Sullivan (who was taken in the retreat from Canada, and 
died in a British prison)— Lieut. Andrew M'Gaffey, of Epsom — George Mc- 
Shannon, who was killed at Bunker Hiil — the Orrs, M'Quades, Goffes, &c. 



IRISH NOVELISTS, POETS, AND DRAMATISTS. 

John Banim — Samuel Bovse — Henry Brooke — William Carleton — Su- 
sannah Centlivke — William Congreve — John Cunningham— Thomas 
Dermody — Sir John Denham — George Farquhar — Gerald Griffin — 
Charles Johnston — Henry Jones — Hugh Kelly — Lady Caroline Lamb — 
Charles Lever — Patrick Linden— Samuel Lover— Adolphus Lynch — 
Edward Lysaght — Charles Macklin — Rev. C. R. Maturin — W. H. 
Maxwell — Arthur Murphy — Thomas Parnell — J. Augustus Shea — 
Frances Sheridan — Henry Tresham — Rev. Charles Wolfe. 

John Banim, the elegant and tender-hearted author of ' The Conscript's 
Sister,' ' Talcs of the CfHara Family,'' and many other interesting works, died 
young, not long since. He was a native of Ireland, amiable but unfortunate. 
At 17 years of age he obtained the first prize as the best draughtsman in the 
Dublin Academy of Arts — at 19 he wrote the Leinster Journal, in his native 
city, Kilkenny, into wide circulation — at 22 he produced Damon and Pythias, 
a successful tragedy at Covent Garden — and was at 25 a successful novelist. 
At 34 he was £400 in debt, a helpless invalid, threatened by his creditors 
with an English prison, and his bookseller a bankrupt. 

Samuel Boyse, a writer of great poetical talent, but dissolute habits, was 
he son of Joseph Boyse (an eminent dissenting minister), and born in Dublin 



BROOKE — CARLETON — CENTLIVRE — CONGREVE — GRIFFIN, &C. 59 

in 170S ; published a volume of poems in 1741, in Scotland — and " The Deity," 
described by Henry Fielding as "a very noble poem," in 1740. Hervey also 
praises it in his Meditations. He also published "Albion's Triumph," a his- 
tory of the Scottish Rebellion in 1746, some six volumes of miscellaneous 
Literature — and died penniless in a garret. 

Henry Brooke, autbor of " the Fool of Quality," a novel much admired 
by the Rev. John Wesley, "the Farmer's Letters," and many other works, 
was born at Rantaven, in Ireland, in 1706, and died Oct. 10th, 17S3. He 
wrote " The Earl of Essex," " Gustavus Vasa," and eleven other plays, and 
cherished through life a sincere love for freedom in its best sense. 

William Carleton, a powerful Irish author of the present times, wrote 
"Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry," The Galway Piper," "Mickey 
McRory," "Rose Moan, the Irish Midwife," " Moll Roe's Wedding," "The 
Poor Scholar," &c, and is one of the most original of all the story-tellers 
about Ireland's Peasantry. 

Si'sa.n wir Ct.ntlivre — author of "The Busy Body," "A Bold Stroke for 
a Wife," and " The Wonder," which still keep possession of the stage, and 
other plays — was born in Ireland about 1667. She was very captivating in 
her manners — had three husbands — and died in 1723. Her maiden name was 
Freeman, and her parentage English. As a dramatist she excels in plot, inci- 
dent, and character. 

William Congreve was born in 1762. "For the place [says Johnson], 
it was said by himself that he owed his nativity to England, and by every- 
body else that he was born in Ireland. He was educated first in Kilkenny, 
and afterward in Dublin." He died in London, Jan. 29, 1728-'9. " Congreve 
[I quote Dr. Johnson] has merit of the highest kind ; he is an original writer, 
who borrowed neither the model of his plot, nor the manner of his dialogue." 
His plays and poetry fill several volumes. 

John Cdnningham, an elegant pastoral poet and dramatist, was born in 
Dublin, Ireland, 1729, and died 1773. He wrote the farce of Love in a Mist, 
at the age of 17, and his works form part of the collections of the British 
poets. 

Thomas Dermodt, a poet of talent, was born at Ennis, Ireland, in 1775, 
and died through intemperance in 1802. His poems contain many passages 
of taste, eiegance, and fancy. 

Sir John Denham, the poet, was born in Dublin in 1615, where his father 
held the office of Chief Baron of the Exchequer. He was educated at Oxford, 
wrote " The Sophy," " Cooper's Hill," a translation of " Cato Major," and is 
" deservedly considered [says Johnson] as one of the fathers of English 
Poetry," whose works " we ought to read with gratitude." He was a royal- 
ist, and lost his estate during Charles the First's troubles, but held office and 
a knighthood under Charles the Second. 

George Farquhar, a very successful and interesting comic poet, was born 
in 1678 at Londonderry, Ireland, where his father was a clergyman— educated 
at Dublin College ; joined a company of strolling players ; got a commission 
in Lord Orrery's regiment; wrote a volume of miscellanies; and married a 
portionless damsel, who deceived him by representing herself as an heiress. 
Before he attained his thirty-second year he had written, The Constant 
Couple, Sir Harry Wildair, The Inconstant, The Twin Rivals, The Stage 
Coach, The Recruiting Officer, and The Beaux' Stratagem. He died in 
1707, poor. For the success of his comedies he is indebted to the natural 
delineation of his characters, the interesting tendency of his plots, and the 
flowing graces and sprightliness of his wit. The licentiousness of the drama 
in his time exhibits their worst defect. 

Gerald Griffin, the gifted author of " Gisippus," was born in Limerick, 
on the 12th of December, 1803, and died of typhus fever on the 12th of June, 
1840. He was the ninth son of his parents. His father emigrated to Penn- 
sylvania, while a part of the family remained in Ireland. At twenty years of 
age Griffin went, to London, and contrived to live by reporting for the press, 
contributing articles to magazines, and acting as the drudge of a great pub- 



LIBRARY OF CONOKtbb 

60 JOHNSTON — JONES — KELLY — LAMB — LEVER — LINDEN — L 

lis bin g house. Next year he was sought after as a rev! 

tributor to periodicals. In 1827, the publication of the 11 022 155 385 

ed his reputation — and his pathetic and impassioned tale, •• ine uoilegians," 
placed him in a high rank among Irish novelists. He was nominated by the 
electors of Limerick, in 183S, to carry to Mr. Moore their request that the 
Irish melodist would represent their ancient city in the British parliament — 
and at one time resolved to become a minister of the Roman Catholic Church. 
Two years before his death he joined the christian brotherhood, who devote 
themselves to the instruction of the poor — and his brother has written a vol- 
ume containing his memoirs. 

Charles Johnston, author of " Chrysal, or the Adventures of a Guinea," 
"The Reverie," "A Flight to the Paradise of Fools," "Juniper Jack," &c, 
was born in Ireland, and died in India, about 1800. 

Henry Jones, a native of Drogheda, was originally a journeyman brick- 
layer. He was a good dramatic poet, but died in 1770, in a garret in London, 
the result of his own caprice, prodigality, and fickleness. 

Hugh Kelly, a clever, successful, and very persevering author, was 
born in Ireland, in 1739, and died in England in 1777. He began life as a 
stay-maker, then turned hackney-writer, was admitted to the bar as a lawyer, 
and lastly turned author. His works are, the Memoirs of a Magdalen, a 
novel — Thespis, a poem — the Romance of an Hour— Clementina, a tragedy — 
and the School for Wives, False Delicacy, and a Word to the Wise, come- 
dies. 

Lady Caroline Lamb was born on the 13th of November, 1785, and died on 
the 25th of January, 1S27 — she was a daughter of Frederick Ponsonby, Earl of 
Besborough, but whether she was a native of Ireland, the country of her fam- 
ily, I have not positively ascertained. She married William Lamb, now 
Lord Melbourne, when in her 20th year, understood several of the living and 
dead languages, was lively and brilliant in conversation, and a great favorite 
of Lord Byron, who, if we are to believe Captain Medwyn, used her cruelly. 
She is the author of " Glenarvon," "Ada Reis," and " Graham Hamilton," 
novels of much merit, and was the friend of Wellington, De Stacl, and other 
illustrious persons. Dropsy caused her death, after a long illness. 

Charles Lever, is a native of Ireland, editor of the Dublin University 
Magazine (as Harry Lorrequer), and author of " Our Mess," " Charles O'Mal- 
ley," and " Jack Hinton," the merits of which novels are very generally 
known and appreciated. His magazine is ultra-tory. 

Patrick Linden was an eminent Irish poet, some of whose elegant verses 
are preserved in " Miss Brooke's Reliques." 

Samuel Lover, a painter, poet, novelist, and dramatist— author of "Rory 
O'More," li The Land of the West," " Handy Andy," " Legends and Stories 
of Ireland," " Treasure Trove," fee. Mr. Lover is an Irishman by birth, 
lalent, and feeling, a man of wit and humor, and said to be " a repealer." 

Adolphus Lynch, author of " Crofton Croker's Legends," and lieutenant 
in the British army, is a native of Ireland. The Limerick Chronicle, of May 
30th, 1838, states that he embraced the doctrines of the church of Rome in 
the convent chapel of Killarney, about that time. 

Edward Lysaght, a witty and convivial member of the Irish bar, was op- 
posed to the Union, a true patriot, a poet of celebrity, and the author of many 
unpalatable effusions to the tory destroyers of Irish independence. Lord Cas- 
tlerea^h admitted that if such" songs as " May he in tchose hand,'''' were gen- 
efally°sung throughout Ireland, they would excite a greater opposition to 
the Union of 1800, than all the speeches against it in the Irish Parliament. 
It concludes with these lines : — 

Beware how you sport with our Island ; 
You're my neighbor, but, Bull, this is my land ! 

Nature's favorite spot, 

And I'd sooner be shot 
Than surrender the rights of our Island ! 



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